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El Santo Grial

Translation: Lidia Díaz Suárez

The Holy Grail

If there is an object full of mystery and enigma in Christianity, that is, without a doubt, the Holy Grail. 

Supposedly, it is the cup that Jesus shared with his twelve apostles in the Last Supper. 

But the Grail went unnoticed through history until the Middle Ages, as we will see now, when legends arose about the object being magical. Such was the fascination on the Grail, that the Nazis, in their nonsensical search for powerful objects, travelled around the entire world to find it. 

Madness aside, the Grail is a symbol, a devotional object, a commemorative treasure from a crucial moment in Christianity and on which the Church stands: the Eucharist.

Although, the most interesting thing is that no one spoke of the Grail until the Middle Ages. That is where we start today’s tale. 

Rogelio de Egusquiza. The Holy Grail (1893).

The story of the Grail

The first reference to the Grail dates back approximately to the year 1180 in France. There, the bard Chrétien de Troyes composed an incomplete text, called Perceval, the Story of the Grail, in which the magical object is barely even mentioned, even if it should have been the main protagonist of the second half of this unfinished work. 

The book does introduce us to two main characters who would appear in latter works on the Grail: Perceval, the hero, and Gawain, his counterpart.

We have numerous editions of this narrative in Spanish. I strongly recommend the edition from Alianza Editorial, which can be acquired in a fantastically edited pocket edition. 

Merely a couple decades later, in German territory, there would be another poet,  Wolfram von Eschenbach, the man responsible of bringing the Holy Grail to life. We have this in his epic poem titled Parzival

This work complements the one written by Chrétien de Troyes: Sir Perceval, a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table, is commissioned with the search for the Holy Grail. 

The philologists have taken this one step further and have found another earlier source, though incomplete, where the Grail is mentioned, also from the hand of von Eschenbach: Titurel, an incomplete romance written approximately in 1217.  

To fully understand Parzival, we could mention Siruela’s edition which, as always, did an excellent editing job. 

The Death of Arthur

William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and John Henry Dearle, ‘Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Perceval find the Holy Grial’, 1890-94.

The source for the grail-related themes in Great Britain would come a couple centuries later with Thomas Malory’s work Le Morte d’Arthur, dated approximately in 1485. This British source is, without question, the one that helped the most with the divulgation of legends on the holy cup.

In the 19th century, this text allowed the creation of a whole series of artistic works related with this topic from the hands of pre-raphaelite painters such as Edward Coley Burne-Jones or Dante Gabriel Rossetti. One of them was the enormous tapestry by Morris & Co. in the decade of 1890, which illustrates the legend of the Holy Grail and that we saw at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid back in 2012. Here I leave you the link to the exposition’s catalogue “William Morris and company: the Arts & Crafts movement in Great Britain”. 

On this note, there is an audio recording of Victoria Cirlot’s keynote lecture, also from the March, titled “The Myth on the Grail in literature and art”, which tells us, much better than I do, the entire history of the rise of legends on the Grail.

Finally, to reflect on the meaning of the Holy Grail’s myth, I propose to you a brilliant text, written by Joseph Campbell, who was one of the world’s greatest experts on mythology, and whose entire work is being translated to Spanish by the publisher Atalanta.

Which one is the true Grail?

Fresco of the Holy Supper in the church of San Isidoro in León.

It seemed like there was a consensus since the 20th century on the fact that the true Grail was in custody in Valencia’s Cathedral, no less. It is composed of a stone from Calcedonia, dated to the 1st century with its foot and metal handle having been added later.

The contemporary historians have tried to prove this story and have traced this object’s route from Judea to Rome and from Rome to Hispania. After that, it appears in the Kingdom of Aragon, more specifically in San Juan de la Peña in the 12th century, and then in the Aljafería or Palace of the Catholic Monarchs in Zaragoza. At last, in the year 1424, the king Alfonso the magnanimous would move the chalice to Valencia in appreciation of their help in the monarch’s mediterranean battles. And from that moment on, the chalice is kept there.

The controversy came in 2014 when two researchers, Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega del Rio, proposed that the true Grail was a cup in custody of the church of San Isidoro de León. Nevertheless, the scientific community continues to support the Valencian chalice.

The Invisible Fire

Apse of San Clemente de Tahull. National Art Museum of Catalonia.

Contemporary literature has also taken an interest in the story of the Grail. I cannot stop citing The Invisible Fire, written by Javier Sierra, which won the Premio Planeta in 2017. As Javier always says, if essays pose questions, literature is, in some form, to answer them. So, the pages of The Invisible Fire take us further in the search of the object to focus on the introspection and the last sense that this cup holds to whom is in the search for it. Somehow, this internal journey also serves as an initiation ritual. So if you wish to know the answer Javier Sierra offers for the Grail, do not stop reading this brilliant title.

Dr. Pedro Ortega

Ingeniero Industrial, Historiador del Arte, Máster en Edición Digital y Doctor en Estética. Es Gestor Cultural de Patrimonio Mundial del Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Edita la revista académica Herejía y Belleza y dirige el sello académico Ediciones Aulós. Es autor en Penguin Random House y ha escrito artículos para El Imparcial, Jot Down e Historia National Geographic, entre otros medios. Pedro Ortega PhD Industrial Engineer, Art Historian, with a M.A. in Digital Publishing and a PhD in Aesthetics. He is the cultural manager at the World Heritage Service of the Madrid City Council. He is a published author at Penguin Random House and has written articles for El Imparcial, Jot Down and Historia National Geographic, among others. Pedro Ortega doktorea Industria Ingeniaria, Artearen Historialaria, Edizio Digitaleko Master-duna eta Estetikan Doktorea. Kultur kudeatzailea da Madrilgo Udaleko Munduko Ondare Zerbitzuan. Penguin Random House-ko idazlea da eta artikuluak idatzi ditu El Imparcial, Jot Down eta Historia National Geographic-entzat, besteak beste.

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OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (27 de septiembre de 2024). El Santo Grial. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 8 de noviembre de 2024 de https://doi.org/10.58079/12dk3


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