In order to understand what the Grail really is, we should recall what its function is, listen carefully to what the well-known story is telling us. It is a chalice or receptacle to hold bodily fluids. More particularly, it was to hold the blood of Christ, used to catch it as it spurted from his body on the cross and then later, symbolically, at the Last Supper.
As we have seen, blood is the distinguishing feature of animal consciousness, and in occult physiology the animal part of our nature nestles in or is carried by — as if by a chalice — the vegetable part of our nature.
The secret of the Holy Grail, then, is not that it represents a bloodline. This, I have already suggested, would go against the esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. Rather it alludes to the role of the vegetable part of our nature as a living receptacle for our spirit or consciousness. The quest for the Grail is the quest for a purified receptacle fit to carry a higher form of spirit, and the trials in the course of the quest involve certain esoteric techniques of purification of the vegetable body. Rudolf Steiner, perhaps the greatest teacher of the twentieth century, said that all serious esoteric work begins with work on the etheric, that is to say the vegetable body.
Because of the Fall our animal selves have become so corrupted and we are in thrall to our sexual selves. In fact our animal selves are so corrupt that this has seeped down into our vegetable and material bodies, and it is beyond our power to purify them. We need supernatural help, and esoteric techniques are intended to enlist this help.
If the plant-like dimension of humanity is purified, we will naturally become more plant-like. Saintly individuals can sometimes live on almost nothing but sunlight, after the manner of plants. The twentieth-century German mystic and miracle-worker Therese Neumann lived for some forty years on nothing more than the daily consumption of a consecrated wafer.
But if techniques to transform our vegetable bodies have existed since ancient times, what was new and distinctive about the techniques involved in the Grail initiation?
In his deeply meaningful second encounter with the wounded Fisher King, Parsifal asks the question, What ails thee, brother?
This shows a combination of selfless compassion and — most significantly — shows a free, enquiring spirit which was new in the eighth century. Here, then, is the beginning of a new impulse towards freedom of thought that marked the beginning of the end of the age of Church authority.
When Parsifal achieves a vision of the Holy Grail, this is a vision of the vegetable body or soul which has been so transformed by moral feeling and intellectual questioning that it is fit to carry a higher form of spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
The historical dimension of the story is contained in the way that Amfortas’s wound causes the country to become a wasteland. The private devotions of initiates affect the destinies of nations.
The form of the story is significant, too. The story of Parsifal’s attainment of the Grail is presented in terms of Parsifal’s inner imaginative vision.
In the temples and Mystery schools of earlier ages wonderful statues were fashioned and gods were called down to inhabit them. In the Middle Ages the great initiates would inspire wonderful imaginative pictures, and it was into these mental images that the gods would descend and breathe life.
On the death of Charlemagne in 814, his empire quickly fell apart, but what has survived to this day is the living idea of a united Europe. Like King Arthur, Charlemagne has never really died but waits to return in time of need.
THE CHURCH GREW IN POWER AND WEALTH. It wanted to be the sole keeper of the keys to the Kingdom. The Church had earlier emphasized that an individual has but one life by suppressing teachings on reincarnation and had emphasized one god by suppressing knowledge of its astronomical roots. Now it emphasized the unity of the disembodied parts of the human being. In 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, the Church effectively closed the door to the spirit worlds by abolishing the ancient distinction between the vegetable dimension of the soul and the animal dimension of the spirit. Soul and spirit were declared to be the same thing, and the result of this was that the spirit worlds, formerly encountered in the Mass, would come to seem an empty abstraction.
Experience of the spirit worlds was replaced by dogma to be accepted on authority.
Meanwhile, a vital Islamic influence, part intellectual, part spiritual, continued to flow into Europe through centres of scholarship like Toledo and Sicily. The study of mathematics, geometry and natural science, inspired in part by the Arabs’ translation and preservation of the works of Aristotle, as well as astronomy and astrology, spread northwards, leading to the formation of the first universities in Europe, based on the Islamic model. It led, too, to the arabesques of Gothic architecture, influenced by the intricate vegetal forms of mosque architecture.
IN THE NORTH PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL at Chartres, founded in 1028, stands Melchizedek bearing the Grail. The astrology that Islam was bringing back to Europe, after it had been driven out several hundred years earlier by Rome, can be seen in the symbolism of the west porch — the fish of Pisces and the twin Templar Knights of Gemini. The pediment also has a fine example of a vesica piscis, a Third Eye that sees the spirit worlds coming through into the material world.
Chartres is a fusion in stone of Islamic mysticism, ancient Celtic spirituality and Neoplatonic Christianity. Atop a hill honeycombed with ancient tunnels and caves, it is believed to have been built on a site sacred to the Mother Goddess. A black virgin, resonant of the kinship between Isis, mother of the Sun god, and Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, can still be seen in the crypt.
Set into the floor of the nave is the most famous labyrinth in Europe. Built in 1200 it is some forty feet in diameter. Before it was taken up to help make canons in the French Revolution, a bronze plaque in the centre depicted Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur.
Of course labyrinths and mazes are ancient pagan artefacts, remains of which are found not only at Knossos but at Hawara in Egypt and in the many open-air labyrinths and mazes found cut in the turf in Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia. Many other Christian churches had labyrinths before the eighteenth century, but these were destroyed because of their pagan associations.
One of the burial mounds at Newgrange in Ireland was still called ‘the spiral castle’ by the locals in the 1950s, because of a spiral carved by the entry portal. The expression ‘our king has gone to the spiral castle’ was an idiomatic way of saying that he had died.
This is the key to understanding the secret symbolism of the labyrinth and of Chartres Cathedral itself. If you enter the labyrinth and follow its track on foot you find yourself moving in a spiral motion, first to the left then curving back to the right as you move towards the centre. Pilgrims following its route are engaged in a dance like the dance of Jesus described in the Acts of St John. The aim, as in all initiatory activity, is to enter an altered state in which the spirit journeys up through the spirit worlds, experiencing the after-death journey while still alive.