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The Grail

Relic of an Ancient Religion

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

The Waste Land

... there is an Unknown Country lying beneath the places that we know, and appearing only in moments of revelation. Hilaire Belloc

THE YEAR is 1984. A-Level French. We're reading Tueur sans Gages.

Bérenger, a nondescript Everyman, is being shown around the Radiant City by the Architect, who also happens to be the Superintendent of Police. The Radiant City fills Bérenger with amazement: everything is suffused with a brilliant light, and it never rains. He is reminded of an old memory, of a time when 'there was a blazing fire inside me ...'

Everything was virgin, purified, discovered anew ... I felt I was there at the gates, at the very centre of the universe ... I walked and ran and cried: I am, I am, everything is, everything is!

But the glorious feeling had passed, replaced by a 'chaotic vacuum', the 'immense sadness you feel at a moment of tragic and intolerable separation.'

'And since then, it's been perpetual November ... The light of dawn has gone! And to think we call this civilisation!'

The Architect is hardly listening to him. A telephone keeps ringing, which the Architect keeps in his pocket, taking it out to answer it. He is both out of the office and still at work.

When Eugène Ionesco wrote Tueur sans Gages in 1957, the idea that a municipal functionary would carry a phone in his pocket was absurd. It still seemed pretty surreal in 1984. But ten years later, I had a phone I could keep in my pocket so that, like the Architect, I was never entirely out of the office.

Looking back, Ionesco's absurdist drama – usually entitled The Killer in English – reads like a snapshot of the 20th century: a time when the absurd became commonplace.

Bérenger is astonished to discover that nobody wants to live in the ideal city. There is a killer on the loose. And no one, it seems, can be bothered to catch him. The police are too busy directing traffic and menacing the public. A Schoolmaster teaches nonsensical history and a political agitator promises to change everything by changing nothing – 'If an ideology doesn't apply to real life, we'll say it does and it'll be perfect ... We'll replace the myths ... by slogans ... and the latest platitudes!' Finally, Bérenger finds himself on an echoing street, desperately trying to reason with the chuckling Killer. The play ends on a note of despair as Bérenger sinks to his knees and moans:

'Oh God! There's nothing we can do. What can we do ... What can we do ...'

This, you could say, was the 20th century in a nutshell. We were continually promising to build the city of the future, but the Killer still lurked in the suburbs and the subways.

For all our technological advances – from bombs that could wipe out whole cities to phones you could carry in your pocket – there was something fundamental missing. Bérenger understood this: 'What I'm suffering from doesn't show, it's theoretical, spiritual.' Another word would be 'existential'. The problem was one of existence.

T.S. Eliot put a name to it in a poem published in the wake of the First World War. Western society seemed zombified, fragmented, morally adrift:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Little had changed in the 35 years which separated the Unreal City of Eliot's The Waste Land from Ionesco's Radiant City on the outskirts of a damp, grey Paris. The need for escape – through sex, drugs, consumerism, political extremism or Eastern mysticism – increased as the century wore on. Television came as a narcotic, the new opiate of the people. But the dis-ease remained: the essential, existential problem would not go away.

The Grail castle

In a series of talks given in 1969 in San Diego, California, a Jungian analyst named Robert A. Johnson approached the problem – much as T.S. Eliot had done in The Waste Land – from the direction of myth, arguing that the medieval legend of Perceval could be interpreted as an essay on modern man. The burden of these lectures was published in He: Understanding Masculine Psychology (1974).

Robert A. Johnson had turned to a 12th century myth to elucidate a 20th century predicament. Like Ionesco's Bérenger, Johnson's Perceval is an Everyman figure. Raised in seclusion by his mother, Perceval encounters five knights in the forest and assumes that they are angels. When he learns that they are in fact knights, he resolves to become a knight himself. His mother dies of a broken heart when Perceval rides off.

During the course of his adventures, Perceval happens upon the Grail Castle, where he sits down to dine with the Fisher King. A mute procession passes in front of him. First, a squire enters the chamber, carrying a lance which bleeds from the tip. The squire is followed by two youths bearing golden candle-holders. With them is a maiden; beautiful, noble and richly-attired, she carries in her two hands a 'grail' which lights up the room.

Perceval had previously been advised not to be too talkative, and so he refrains from enquiring about this strange ritual. He goes to bed and wakes up to find the castle deserted. As he rides out, the drawbridge snaps shut behind him. He soon finds himself being criticised for his failure to ask the crucial question.

Robert A. Johnson considered Perceval's experience in the Fisher King's castle to be typical of young men. At some point during adolescence, every youth stumbles into a Grail Castle. The world suddenly appears different: magical, full of promise, as if his consciousness has been raised. He senses that the universe holds possibilities beyond anything he had imagined.

William Wordsworth expressed a similar feeling, softly and succinctly, in his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

The experience also compares with Bérenger's memories in Tueur sans Gages of his adolescent awakening: 'I was deeply aware of the unique joy of being alive ... Suddenly the joy became more intense, breaking all bounds! And then, oh what indescribable bliss took hold of me!'

Robert Johnson believed that this moment 'usually happens around fifteen or sixteen years of age' (Bérenger recalls that he had last experienced 'that dazzling radiance, that glowing feeling' when he was seventeen or eighteen). It is not just in early childhood that the world can appear apparelled in celestial light; even in mid-to-late adolescence a young man can be pleasantly surprised by a moment of transcendence, a glimpse of the Grail.

What this moment consists of – and how it might be recreated –will be part of the subject of this study. For now, we might simply observe that the 'Grail Castle' experience which, Johnson claimed, is shared by every young male (though the experience is invariably a solitary one) comprises a brief interlude in which the youth ceases to be governed by thinking and succumbs to being. It is as if the boundaries of the ego (still forming in adolescence) are dissolved. The barrier between the inner 'subjective' realm and the outer 'objective' reality collapses, and the young man is suddenly immersed in the world – a participant, rather than a detached spectator.

Plato's cave

For most of our waking hours we inhabit a world of hard surfaces, which we apprehend from the viewpoint of an isolated, self-enclosed 'I'. Thus, I see a rock and recognise it as something solid and immobile. There is a distance, a gulf between me and the rock, even as I reach out to touch it, because 'I' am the subject and the rock is the object. We are separate things.

Modern man assumes that this is the only reality there is. The Celtic imagination, however, regards certain places as 'thin', which is as much as to say that the seemingly impenetrable veil between realities – the inner 'I-ness' and the outer 'Other-ness' – can become flimsy and permeable.

The Greek philosopher Plato described, in The Republic, a group of prisoners chained to the floor of a cave, watching shadows on the wall. Because they can see nothing else, the prisoners believe that they are observing reality. But this perception is false. What the prisoners see are merely the silhouettes of things which exist beyond the limits of their vision.

Our everyday reality is something of a shadow-play. We see forms but seldom suspect that they might be manifestations of a deeper reality. If we could but loosen our chains and swivel round we would discover – after our eyes had adjusted to the unaccustomed light – something more substantial than the shadows we had been viewing before. This, argued Plato (or rather his mouthpiece, Socrates), is how liberated philosophers perceive the world. It is also what the Celt meant by a 'thin' place, for it is possible that the walls of the cave can shimmer and fade, and for the immanent reality which underscores the apparent world to reveal itself.

This can only happen when we abandon the ego habit and abolish the artificial distinction between subject and object, the 'I' and the 'Other' – that is, when we stop thinking and start being.

If Robert Johnson's interpretation of the Grail myth is correct, and if Eugène Ionesco's drama is anything to go by, the experience of a contented and awakened state of being is not uncommon, at least in adolescence. It struck Bérenger as he was walking along a narrow street in a little country town and Perceval as he sat down to dine with the Fisher King. In both instances, a dominant theme is light: the 'celestial light' which, as Wordsworth recalled from his childhood, vouchsafed him a vague sense, an intimation or presentiment, of immortality. Bérenger remembers that the 'light grew more and more brilliant ... It's as if there were four suns in the sky'. Perceval beholds the Grail, borne by a beautiful maiden: 'After she had entered the hall carrying the grail the room was so brightly illumined that the candles lost their brilliance like stars and the moon when the sun rises.'

Returning to Plato's parable of the cave, we can posit that the peak experience which occurs during childhood and/or adolescence happens because the metaphorical chains which hold us down are loosened and we find ourselves facing, not the wall of the cave, but the entrance, where the things which cast their shadows on the wall are brightly illuminated. Dazzled at first, we enjoy a momentary glimpse of the world as it really is – apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

But the moment passes. The vision crumbles, the radiant light fades, and we are thrust back into Bérenger's 'perpetual November, perpetual twilight, twilight in the morning, twilight at midnight, at noon.' Perceval awakes to find the castle deserted. The gates slam shut and the hidden retreat of the Fisher King disappears from view.

THE QUEST BEGINS

In his analysis of the Perceval legend, Robert A. Johnson put this sudden, crushing return to everyday reality down to immaturity. The adolescent male who experiences the Grail moment has yet to acquire the spiritual or psychological resources to make the most of it. Perceval remains tongue-tied in the presence of the 'grail' and this, we soon learn, is a grave error – had he asked the appropriate questions, the Fisher King would have been restored to health. Such reticence, though, is understandable: who can know what questions are to be asked of the moment of transcendence, the vision of radiance, when it occurs during the teen years?

Johnson cited an old proverb from the Middle Ages which held that 'a person has a chance at the splendour of God, at the golden world, twice in his life – once early in adolescence and again when he is forty-five or fifty.' The first visit to the Grail Castle is a kind of preparatory experience, a transitory glimpse of a reality which exists beyond the narrow bounds of egoconsciousness. The opportunity will arise again, later in life, when hopefully we are better prepared for it.

Without that initial Grail experience life would be pretty meaningless, a brutish struggle for survival consisting of little more than 'getting and spending', in Wordsworth's words ('The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers'). Bérenger admits that 'It's only the memory of what happened that's helped me to go on living in this grey city.' But the memory also turns Bérenger into an alienated outsider, surrounded by human robots and dead souls. And this, one might say, is the very definition of the Waste Land. The land seems barren, the city 'unreal'. The Grail experience – always a solitary one – shows us the reality behind appearances. After that, nothing in our daily lives seems really real.

The young man who dimly remembers his moment of awakening, the dawning of a sort of super-consciousness, can never be truly at peace. Life outside the Grail Castle is painfully empty. Endless amounts of energy will be expended – and much money spent – in trying to rediscover the entrance to the 'hidden retreat' or to compensate for the loss of the vision, often with disastrous consequences. The cost to the individual, his relationships, and society in general can be colossal.

It would help if we could only avoid falling into the trap of believing the Grail to be a thing. Such thinking is typical of a materialistic age and leads only to wild-goose chases and disillusionment. The advertising industry thrives by dandling the promise of the Grail before our glassy eyes, but the Grail is not for sale. Anyone who tells you otherwise saw you coming.

By placing too much emphasis on the Grail as an artefact, a material object, the storytellers have overlooked its primary function. It was not a thing but a process, and in later chapters we will examine what this process might have involved, both in terms of the outer rituals and the inner workings of the brain (for this investigation will have no real value unless its conclusions are grounded in science and applicable to the physical universe we inhabit). Furthermore, as we shall see in the next chapter, an understanding of the process is both timely and necessary. The Grail has eluded us for too long, and we have made a terrible mess – a veritable Waste Land of our planetary home – while flailing about in a facile and costly search for the wrong thing.

Nevertheless, if we are to come anywhere near an appreciation of the Grail experience we must determine what form the Grail took. In other words, we must recognise what the Grail was before we can grapple with what it was for.

The wise fool

The earliest mention of the Grail occurs in a poem written in the 1180s by a French troubadour named Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval, le Conte du Graal runs to about 9,000 lines. Chrétien almost certainly never completed it, and a succession of poets attempted to round off the story. In addition to the total of 54,000 lines contributed by the four 'Continuations' of the poem there is also a short prologue or Elucidation, which names the source of the material as one 'Master Blihis', of whom more anon.

The hero of Chrétien's poem is Perceval le Gallois – 'Perceval the Welshman'. The term is potentially misleading; 'Welsh' derives from a Germanic word meaning 'foreign' and would have referred initially to the native inhabitants of Britain: especially those parts of Britain which, between the 1 and 5 centuries AD, had come under Roman rule. Perceval was not necessarily Welsh in the familiar sense of the word. He belonged to the Cymry ('fellow-countrymen') who were eventually driven out of their tribal lands and into modern-day Wales by the incoming English in what has been aptly described as 'an ethnic cleansing event'.

Perceval is the naïve son of 'the widow lady of the Waste Forest'. His father was 'wounded through his thighs and his body maimed' in the manner of the Fisher King, and both his elder brothers died in combat, their father then dying of grief, which explains his mother's neurotically over-protective behaviour towards her son. But when Perceval encounters five knights riding through the forest he is overawed and eager to attain the status of knighthood. His heartbroken mother gives him some advice – always come to the aid of a maiden in distress, and if a lady offers you a ring you may take it. She then faints dead away when Perceval takes his leave of her.

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Excerpted from The Grail by Simon Andrew Stirling, Lloyd Canning. Copyright © 2014 Simon Andrew Stirling. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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