Lecture One:
A.E. Waite remarked that he had received many initiations and could say with confidence that the initiatic tradition held no deeper or more central tradition than that of the Holy Grail. "I affirm", he continues, "on the authority of research...and on that which I have seen of the Mysteries...that the term of the quest in those Secret Orders which are good and just and holy...is the term of the Grail Quest." Similarly our Martinist "Mystic's Monitor" you will find:
"What is the initiate's goal?"
The conquest of the Adventurous Castle.
"What does he hope to find in the Adventurous Castle?"
The Sacred Vase.
Yet the words are obscure and seem to remove one veil only to confront us with another. It would be understandable if the reader turned away with the thought that here is another example of the esotericist love of mystification and high-sounding words for their own sake and of the confusion of mist for Mysticism.
While this would be understandable, it would also be unfortunate and it shall be the show intention of these lectures to clarify what can be clarified and to what significance the Holy Grail can have for us. At the end of our study we shall hope to have shown that Waite's, and the 'Monitor's', words are precisely correct and that the Grail represents the goal of the spiritual life not only as one possible symbol among many but as a unique reality towards which everything else leads. We will try to present this extremely complex material as simply as possible without distortion, and we shall try to focus on what may be practical and useful in the spiritual life which is our daily quest.
The Grail is the Chalice of the Last Supper in which later, according to some accounts, "the precious blood of the Savior was gathered on the day when He was crucified to redeem mankind from Hell. (Perlesvaus)." "The point at which the myth of the Grail begins holds in its first appearance the most important account of all," writes Charles Williams--a novelist, poet and Christian magus whose words are worth quoting at some length here "No invention can come near it; no fabulous imagination excel it.
All the greatest mythical details are only there to hint at the thing that happens; that which in the knowledge of Christendom is the unifying act, perilous and perpetual, universal and individual. That origin took place in Jerusalem...Its record is in the Gospels... “And as they were eating he (Jesus) took bread, and when he had blessed, he brake it, and gave it to them and said, Take ye: this is my body, and he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many. "Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it anew in the Kingdom of God." This is the first mention of that Cup which in its progress through the imagination of Europe was to absorb into itself so many cauldrons...and vessels of magic."
"Here," as one text reads, "begins the Book of the Holy Grail, Here begin the terrors, Here begin the miracles." Here at the Last Supper, and so an understanding of the Christian Eucharist is necessary at the very start of our quest, and indeed we shall discover that the whole quest draws us towards the heart of the Eucharist. This should be almost too obvious to require saying, yet there are those who miss it. Just as there were knights in King Arthur's time who, as we shall see, set out on the quest in the wrong way, so even now there are some who say they are on the quest who really do not believe that the Grail is anything more than a personal dream, an idealization of the self. And that, then, is all they will find. But the Grail is real and, “no invention can come near it; no fabulous imagination can excel it." So what, then, is the meaning of the Eucharist, the Last Supper?
In a few words, which cannot substitute for further study, meditation and above all experience, God——in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ gave himself for the life of the world (so fulfilling the mysterious words of the ancient Heraclitus that "gods and men live each others lives and die each others deaths").
The whole life of Jesus Christ was a giving to the world of a share in the Divine Life by his experience, as God, of human life with all its sorrows and joys and finally its very depth of despair and death...all of this was experienced by God, in Christ, so that our life might be united to the Divine Life and we might share, as humans, in the Divinity. He went, as it were, all the way down--to the limit of materiality, of darkness and of death--to bring us all the way up into the sharing of His Resurrection.
The two became one: Divine and Human, Above and Below The union of humanity with Divinity in shared death and rebirth to eternal life which is symbolically promised in all those old stories of dying and rising gods, of Attis and of Osiris, is now made real once and for all on all levels of all the worlds in the cross and Resurrection which are both represented and communicated to us in the Eucharist.
Jesus took bread and wine, the basic food and drink that sustain physical life, and made them the vessels of the Divine and supernatural life, which is poured, out into the world in Sacrifice and gathered up in Resurrection. "Receive ye the Body of Christ, taste ye of the immortal fountain of Life!" as an ancient Eucharistic hymn invites. In the Eucharist the worlds are united, bread and wine to the Life of God, and my (and your) daily life to the life of Eternity. The Grail is vessel of that union, but so too is the poorest chalice in the smallest church where the Supper is celebrated. We will later try to trace the relation of the individual quest for the Holy Grail with the same individual's experience of the common Eucharist, but for now we start, as we must with the Grail at Jerusalem at the table of the Last Supper and with the realization that it unites the worlds.
"...And then he knew that everybody, all the people...gone, living and unborn, stood in some instant of life and death at the place of the Grail...the possible and the impossible, the real and the aspiration, the depth and the height——that was what it was, the reconciliation of all these, not in an instant of time but in all time, everywhere and always the action of this reconciliation: that was the true work of God and man...and with that, as he answered 'Amen, a golden light broke from the Grail like the rising of the sun." S.A. Laubenthal Excalibur
If we start with some comprehension of this vision, and of the Eucharist, we will not be confused as we go on to pass, as we must in following the Grail, between history and legend and between the esoteric and the exoteric, for here is the resolution of these things and of all things.
(to read Grail Lectures 2-7 and appendix, select "next" button at the bottom of page to continue to next lecture)
