6 § The Holy Grail
Arthur Edward Waite has published a work on the legends of the Holy Grail [1] that is imposing in its dimensions and by the amount of research
that it represents. All who are interested in the question will be able to find in it a very complete and methodical exposition of the multiple texts which relate to the Grail question, as well as the diverse theories which have been proposed to explain the origin and the significance of these legends that are so complex, and at times even contradictory in certain of their elements. It must be added that Waite did not intend to produce a work of erudition only, and he is to be commended for this. We are in entire agreement with him on the minimal value of all work that does not go beyond this point of view, and of which the interest can only be 'documentary'. Waite intended to clarify the real and 'inner' significance of the symbolism of the Holy Grail and of the 'quest'. Unfortunately, we feel bound to say that this aspect of his work is the one which seems least satisfactory. The conclusions he reaches are even rather disappointing, especially if one thinks of all the work done in order to reach them, and it is on this point that we would like to formulate several observations which will, quite naturally, relate to questions we have treated on other occasions.
We do not think we would be doing Waite any injustice if we say that his work is somewhat one-sighted [2] or, as might be said in French, 'partial'. It might not be rigorously exact, and in any case we do not mean by this that the author intended to be partial. It has more to do with a failing frequently to be found with specialists in certain kinds of studies: they tend to reduce everything to a certain perspective or to neglect what cannot be so reduced. That the Grail legend is Christian is incontestable, and Waite is right in affirming it. But does this prevent it from being something else at the same time? Those who are aware of the fundamental unity of all traditions will not see any incompatibility whatsoever in this possibility. But Waite, for his part, is somehow bent on seeing only that which is specifically Christian, thus enclosing himself within a particular tradition, whose relations with other traditions, precisely through its 'inward' dimension, seem to escape him. Not that he denies the existence of elements from another source, probably prior to Christianity, for this would go against the evidence; but he allows them only a very mediocre importance and seems to consider them as accidentals, as having been added to the legends from outside, simply in virtue of their presence in the setting in which the legend was elaborated. He thus looks on these elements as deriving from what is commonly known as 'folklore', so called not always with disdain as the word itself might suggest, but rather to satisfy a certain 'fashion' of our time and without always taking into account the intentions that are implied therein. Perhaps it is worth while to dwell on this point a little.
The very conception of 'folklore', as commonly understood, rests on a radically false idea, namely that there are 'popular creations', spontaneous
productions of the mass of the people; and one sees immediately the relationship between this perception and 'democratic' prejudices. As has been rightly said, 'the profound interest of all so-called popular traditions is the fact that they are not popular in origin'; [3] and we will add that if it is a question of genuinely traditional elements, as is almost always the case, however deformed, diminished or fragmentary they may sometimes be, as well as things having a genuine symbolic value-all that, far from being of popular origin, is not even of human origin. What may be popular is solely the fact of survival, when these elements belong to traditional forms that are now defunct; and in this respect the term folklore takes on a meaning very near that of 'paganism', if we consider only the etymology of the word 'pagan', and not its 'polemical' use as a term of reproach. It is thus that the people conserve, without understanding them, the debris of ancient traditions that sometimes go back to a past too remote to be dated, so that it has to be relegated to the obscure domain of 'prehistory'; they thereby fulfil the function of a sort of more or less 'subconscious' collective memory, the content of which has manifestly come from elsewhere. [4] What may seem most surprising is that on closest scrutiny the things so preserved are found to contain, under a more or less veiled form, an abundance of esoteric information, which is, in its essence, precisely what is least popular; and this fact suggests of itself an explanation which may be summed up as follows. When a traditional form is on the point of becoming extinct, its last representatives may deliberately entrust to this aforesaid collective memory what would otherwise be lost beyond recall; that is, in fact, the only means of saving what can, in some measure, be saved. At the same time, the natural incomprehension of the masses is a sufficient guarantee that what has an esoteric character will not be laid bare and profaned, but will remain only as a sort of witness of the past for those who, in later times, will be capable of understanding it.
Having said this, let us add that we do not see why everything that pertains to traditions other than Christianity should be attributed to folklore, without any more thorough examination, Christianity alone being exempt from this attribution. Such seems to be the intention of Waite when he accepts the folklore denomination for pre-Christian and especially Celtic elements which are to be found in legends of the Grail. In this respect, there are no privileged traditions; the only distinction to be made is between traditions which have disappeared and those which are still living, so that it all comes down to knowing whether the Celtic tradition was really no longer living when the legends in question were constituted. At the very least, this is debatable. On the one hand, this tradition may have lasted longer than is commonly believed, with a more or less hidden organization, whereas, on the other
hand, the legends themselves may be older than the 'critics' think, not necessarily because there may have been texts that are lost today, which we are scarcely more inclined to believe than Waite is, but because at first these legends may have been transmitted orally for several centuries, which is far from being an exceptional fact. For our part, we see there the mark of a 'junction' between two traditional forms, one ancient and the other new, the Celtic and the Christian traditions, a junction by which that which was to be saved from the first was somehow incorporated into the second. Doubtless, this would have been modified up to a certain point as to its outward form, by adaptation and assimilation, but not by being transposed onto another plane, as Waite would have it, for there are equivalences between all regular traditions. What faces us here therefore, is something quite other than a mere question of 'sources', in the sense that modern scholars understand this. It might well be difficult to give an exact place and date for this junction, but that has only a secondary and mainly historical interest. Moreover, it is easy to see that these things are among those that do not leave traces in written 'documents'. Perhaps the 'Celtic Church' or the 'Culdeen Church' deserves more attention in this respect than Waite seems disposed to accord it; even its denomination suggests this; and it is not unlikely that there may have been something behind it of a different order, not religious but initiatic, for like all that relates to the links between different traditions, the junction we are speaking of here necessarily belongs to the initiatic or esoteric domain. Exoterism, whether religious or not, never goes beyond the limits of the traditional form to which it strictly pertains. That which surpasses these limits cannot pertain to a 'Church' as such; the Church can only serve as its outward 'support'.
Another observation is likewise called for, this time on symbolism: there are symbols which are common to the most diverse and most widely separated traditional forms, not as a result of 'borrowings', which in many cases would be quite impossible, but because in reality they pertain to the Primordial Tradition from which these forms have issued either directly or indirectly. This is precisely the case with the vase or the cup. Why should it only be folklore in prechristian traditions, while in Christianity alone it is an essentially 'eucharistic' symbol?
It is not the assimilations of Bournouf [5] or others which are to be rejected here, but rather the naturalistic interpretations which they have sought to impose on Christianity as on everything else and which, in reality, are nowhere valid. What needs doing is thus the exact opposite of what has been done by Waite who, stopping short at outward and superficial explanations which he trustingly accepts when they do not apply to Christianity, perceives radically different and unrelated meanings where there are only more or less multiple aspects of one and the same symbol or its various applications.
Doubtless it would have been otherwise if he had not been led astray by his preconceived notion that there is a sort of difference in kind between Christianity and other traditions. In the same way, although he very rightly rejects any application to the Grail mysteries of those theories which are bound up with so called 'gods of vegetation', it is regrettable that he is much less clear with regard to the mysteries of antiquity which have never had anything in common with this quite recently invented naturalism. The 'gods of vegetation' and other fictions of this kind have never existed except in the imagination of Fraser [6] and those like him, whose anti-traditional intentions cannot be doubted.
In point of fact, it seems that Waite has been more or less influenced by a certain 'evolutionism', a tendency that comes out into the open when he declares that what is important is much less the origin of the legend than its final state; and he appears to believe that there must have been, from the one to the other, a sort of progressive improvement. The truth is that wherever something genuinely traditional is concerned, everything must already be there from the very beginning; the later developments only serve to make it more explicit, without adding new elements from some other source.
Waite seems to admit a sort of 'spiritualisation' by which a higher meaning might be grafted onto something that did not have it at the outset, whereas in fact, it is rather the inverse of this that generally takes place; he comes all too close here to the profane outlook of the 'historians of religions'. We find, in connection with alchemy, a striking example of this kind of reversal: he thinks that material alchemy preceded spiritual alchemy and that the latter appeared only with Kuhnrath and Jacob Boehme. If he knew certain Arabic treatises which are definitely earlier than these, he would be obliged to modify his opinion simply in the light of written documents. Moreover, as he recognizes that the language used is the same in the two cases, we might ask how he can be sure that in any given text it is merely a question of material operations. The truth is that it was not always felt desirable to declare expressly that something else was involved, something which, on the contrary, it was precisely the function of the symbolism to veil; and if subsequently there were those who did declare it, this was above all in view of degeneration traceable to the fact that there were then men who, ignorant of the value of symbols, understood everything literally and in an exclusively material sense. These were the 'blowers', the precursors of modern chemistry. To think that a new meaning can be given to a symbol, a meaning that is not inherent in it, is almost a negation of symbolism, for it amounts to making it something artificial and entirely arbitrary, and in any case something purely human. In this connection, Waite goes so far as to say that everyone finds in a symbol what he puts there himself, so that its meaning would change with the mentality of each epoch. We recognize here the psychological theories
that are so dear to many of our contemporaries. Were we not then right to speak of evolutionism?
We have often said, and we cannot repeat it too often: every real symbol bears its multiple meanings within itself, and this is so from its very origin; for it is not constituted as such in virtue of human convention but in virtue of the law of correspondence which links all the worlds together. If some see these meanings while others do not, or see them only partially, they are none the less really there: it is the 'intellectual horizon' of each person that makes all the difference. Symbolism is an exact science and not a daydream in which individual fantasies can have a free run.
In things of this order, therefore, we do not believe in the 'inventions of the poets' to which Waite seems disposed to attach great importance. Far from bearing on the essential, these inventions serve only to hide it, intentionally or otherwise, by clothing it in misleading 'fictive' appearances; and sometimes they hide it only too well, for when they encroach too much it becomes almost impossible to probe to the depth of the original meaning. Was it not thus that symbolism, with the Greeks, degenerated into mythology? This danger is to be feared especially when the poet himself is unaware of the real value of the symbols, for obviously such a case can occur. The fable of the 'donkey carrying relics' applies here as well as in many other situations. The poet, then, will play a part analogous to that of the common people when they unwittingly conserve or transmit initiatic teaching, as we mentioned above. The particular question that arises here is: are the authors of the Grail romances to be placed in this category or, on the contrary, were they conscious in one degree or another of the profound significance of what they were expressing? It is not easy to answer this question with any certainty, for here too appearances can be misleading. Where there is a mixture of insignificant and incoherent elements, one is tempted to think that the author did not know what he was speaking about. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily so, for it often happens that obscurities and even contradictions may be perfectly intentional and that seemingly pointless details may have the express purpose of leading astray the attention of the profane, just as a symbol can be hidden in a more or less complicated motif of ornamentation. In the Middle Ages, especially, examples of this kind abound, even if it be only with Dante and the Fedeli d'Amore. The fact that the higher meaning shines through less with Chrestien de Troyes, for example, than with Robert de Borron does not necessarily prove that the first was less well aware of it than the second. Still less should it be concluded that this meaning is absent from his writings, which would be an error comparable to that of attributing to the ancient alchemists preoccupations only of a material order, for the sole reason that they did not deem it appropriate to spell out literally that their science was in reality of a spiritual nature. [7]
Moreover, the question of the 'initiation' of the authors of romances perhaps has less importance than one might at first think, for in any case this makes no difference to the outward form under which the subject is presented. Once there is any question of exteriorising, but in no sense 'vulgarising', esoteric data, it is easy to understand that the form would have to be as it is. We will go even further: for the purposes of such an exteriorisation even a profane person may serve as spokesman for an initiatic organisation which, in such a case, will have chosen him for this purpose for his qualities as writer or poet, or for some other thoroughly contingent reason. Dante wrote with perfect knowledge. Chrestien de Troyes, Robert de Borron and many others probably understood much less of what they expressed; and some among them probably understood nothing at all. But ultimately it is a matter of little importance, for if there was an initiatic organisation behind them, whatever it may have been, the danger of a deformation due to their incomprehension was thereby averted, such an organisation being able to guide them without them even suspecting it, either through the intermediary of one of its members supplying them with elements to be used in the work or by other suggestions and influences, more subtle and less tangible, but none the less real and effective.
There would seem to be no doubt that the origins of the Grail legend are to be attributed to the transmission of traditional initiatic elements from Druidism to Christianity. Once this transmission had been duly made with all regularity, however it may have taken place, these elements thereby became an integral part of Christian esoterism.