Lecture Two: The Kingdom
The story of the Grail began to fascinate the European mind in the twelfth century (we may date it specifically to the appearance of Chretien de Troyes Perceval in 1150), and the reign of King Arthur--where all the storytellers focused their interest--was in the sixth century in Britain. How did they get the Grail from the room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem in the first century to England some 500 years later? The stories are complex and we will summarize, leaving aside a number of points--some of which we will return to pick up later.
The history of the Grail is, in all accounts, first of all linked with Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man who became a disciple of Christ and who cared for Jesus' body after the crucifixion, placing in his own tomb. It is said that Joseph caught some of Christ's blood in the chalice of the Last Supper with which he had been entrusted. After the Resurrection Joseph, being suspected of having stolen the body is imprisoned for forty-two years during which time he is kept alive and comforted by the Grail which Christ again miraculously brings to him. Christ also instructs him, after his release, to establish a "table" of the Grail. This he does and on it his brother-in-law Brons places a fish beside the Chalice and so from that time the Guardians of the Grail have the title of Fisher King. At this table only the righteous can sit and at one seat no one can safely sit, in memory of the seat of Judas, until the son of the son of Brons.
"All who hear him spoken of will call him the Rich Fisher because of the fish he caught... and just as the world
moves, so too must (the Keeper of the Grail and his people) move to the west." (Robert de Boron). And so Joseph and Brons and their people went to the west. According to one account they and their descendents established the second table of the Grail at Muntsalvach, Mount Salvation, in Europe where the Grail is guarded by an order of knights. But according to what is, we may feel, the central line of the tradition, the Grail is brought to Britain. Joseph and his party land there at Glastonbury and the Grail and the table of the Fisher King are guarded at the mysterious castle of Carbonek. In the time when Arthur rules Britain from Camelot, it is King Belles who is Guardian at Carbonek.
This in brief is the story. The first thing we might consider is the kingdom of the Grail King of what land is he king? If Arthur is ruler of Britain as a whole, then of what is Pelles ruler? The answer is that he is king on a higher and spiritual level where kingship and priesthood are united, lord of an inner land of reality of which the outer world is but a shadow. So we read in Genesis 14 of the mysterious king Melchisedek who meets Abraham and of whom St. Paul writes:
"This Melchisedek, King of Salem, priest of God Most High...is, as his title denotes, king of justice and also king of Peace; who is without … origin...this Melchisedek dwells as a Priest in perpetuity." We note also that the priesthood of Melchisedek consisted in the offering of bread and wine. The idea of a sort of "inner "
In Mission de l'Indie and later by Ferdinand Ossendowski in connection with the imagined city of Agarttha. However perhaps the clearest explanation of the "inner kingdom" is in the work of Plato, whom all Hermeticists should recognize as master and unequalled teacher, and then in that of the contemporary English writer C.S. Lewis. Plato, having developed his ideal city in the Republic answers the objection: "I think it can be found nowhere on earth." "Well, said I, perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and by so beholding to constitute himself its citizen." kingship of the world is developed along esoteric, and somewhat eccentric (involving for example a system of tunnels under the oceans) lines by Yves Saint d'Alveydre.
C.S. Lewis states (in his children's story, The Last Battle) that "our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in the Real world." and "(there is a) Real England, an England within England...and in that inner England no good thing is destroyed." He goes on to say that all the "Real lands" are like connected spurs of a central mountain. Again, in That Hideous Strength, Lewis writes of the fellowship around a modern Fisher King who is ruler of the "Real" England, or Logres, as opposed to the outer world of factories, newspapers and so on. Each land contains that which is good, and hence real and eternal, and that which is not. So similarly we might speak of an essential, or "inner America" which has its roots in the Eternal world, and of the "outer America". To the “inner kingdom" belongs every thing, and every action that is good and beautiful and just.
Now what we learn from Melchisedek, on the one hand, and the Fisher King of Carbonek, on the other, is that
every Real Land--which is to say the inner heart of every land--is nourished and sustained by the Grail. Which is to say, to go back to our previous work, by the Eucharist in which the worlds are harmonized, for the Grail is a particular presence of the Eucharist. The Real lands, of the Grail King, are those which will remain when the world, as we know it, passes away, and this leads to consideration of the two ways in which the future, and end, of human history may be conceived from the point of view of the Grail.
The first is by a sort of alchemical process of transformation in which the whole of humanity is transformed, as a beginning, the Grail Kings were maintained and transformed into more than material life by the Grail and the Blood of Christ. In this vision, the Blood of Christ, which falls into the earth by the cross, symbolizes--and indeed is--the Divine Life, which enters into and gradually transforms the world. This view, we note, fits well with, but does not require, a belief in the transmigration of souls. It also fits well with, and perhaps requires, certain optimism about the progress of history--of the outer as well as the inner kingdoms, of Britain as well as Logres.
The second view that we may take, looking out from the tower of Carbonek, is of a Real world--of which we might say that the axis runs from Jerusalem to Carbonek--mysteriously coming to a fullness at which point the apparent, but ultimately unworthy of reality, outer world and history will fade away and separate from it--that which is real passing, through the Grail, into Reality, that which is unreal Losing its subsistence forever.
"And the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll." Isaiah 34:4 (similarly Revelation 6:14)
Or T.S. Eliot; "With a hollow rumble of wings/with a movement of darkness on darkness, /.... the distant panorama, /and the imposing facade are all being rolled away."
We may prefer one view or the other, this writer inclines to the second, but this is not the important thing. The important thing is to come to a vision of the "Real Lands", of the lands of the Fisher King, and to a realization of how they, and we, are nourished by the Grail. We will try to enter those Lands a little further in our next lecture.
Back to Top
