THE ANCIENT SECRET SCIENCE REVEALED
The Nature of the Quest The Ancient Secret Science Revealed Many literary critics seem to think that a hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. But the true test of a hypothesis, if it cannot be shown to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates and explains. [Cornford, Origins of Attic Comedy] Disjecta Membra The theme of the Quest for the Holy Grail is so much a part of Western Culture that it would be difficult to even imagine its absence. The number of books, paintings, sculptures, plays, movies, popular songs, and other artistic or literary expressions that deal with the “matter of the Grail” is too numerous to even count. The Holy Grail represents many things to many people, but in general, we could say that it represents the Quest for All and Everything. This attitude has crept into our language when we say, “Oh, he’s searching for the Holy Grail of _____”. You can fill in the blank about any field of endeavor. Everyone who considers the subject, even momentarily, is certain that at the core of the Legend is a secret and/or some ultimate prize of material nature. It could even be said that the attachment Western Society has to the Legends of the Grail is really all out of proportion to the actual confusing content of the stories themselves. In fact, many people who are certain that there is a deep meaning to the Legend of the Holy Grail haven’t even read the original stories that gave birth to that legend. Yet, something acts on us - each and everyone - to trigger the imagination, the soul, whenever the subject comes up; and this suggests that there is some vital thing - some magic - some mysterious archetypal dream - that the very words “Holy Grail” awakens in the spirit of Western peoples. It activates something in our collective unconscious, transforming the muddled and confusing elements of the original stories into an enchanted land of heroic love and mighty feats of derring-do that can only be performed by the purest and the best; and all of us - in our most private fantasies - a dream that we are “The One” who can achieve the Grail. Anyone who studies the matter of the Grail already knows that there are literally multiple thousands of scholarly and/or imaginative works on the subject. There are30 The Secret History of the World essays, studies, criticisms - volumes of them - devoted to this fascinating subject. The student of Grail literature also knows that these endless treatments of the subject present an almost hopeless muddle of contradictory opinions and perspectives. For example, there is one school of thought that proposes the Grail to be an entirely “Christian matter”. There are undeniably Christian elements that dominate certain versions. Then, there is the school of thought that claims that the Grail matter is essentially pagan, and most definitely of Celtic provenance. They point out that the later Christianized versions were attempts by ecclesiastics to “cover-up” and amalgamate a popular theme to Christian purposes. These two are the broadest divisions, but no means the only ones! Each group can be subdivided into branching schools, holding forth on any of dozens of theories. The problem is that each of these two perspectives and their many subsets is faced with insurmountable problems when trying to promote their individual arguments. The theory of the Christian origin of the Grail breaks down completely when confronted with the most distressing fact that there is no Christian tradition concerning a “Joseph of Arimathea”. It seems that Joseph does not exist outside of the Grail stories and must be relegated - by Christianity - to romantic fantasy. In fact, as Jessie Weston reported, as early as 1260, the Dutch writer, Jacob van Maerlant denounced the whole Grail issue as “lies”, declaring that the Church knew nothing of it. And he was right. The Pagan-Celtic advocates have to face their own difficulties when dealing with the legends. The part of the Grail stories that can be proven to be definitely pagan and Celtic - the Perceval story - in its original form, has nothing to do with the Grail at all! So the problem is this: while parallels can be found for one or another feature of the whole cycle of stories when taken in isolation, this cannot serve a broad overview because to derive parallels necessitates breaking the stories up into a group of independent themes. There is no “Q” document, as is theorized for the Gospels of the New Testament - a lost original source from which different elements are drawn. There is no prototype with all the elements in one story - the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden Castle with its otherworldly feast and mysterious vessel and maidens, the Bleeding Lance and Cup. In short, for either the pagan-Celtic or Christian perspective, there is just no original source that has preserved all of the elements together. What this means is that the most logical approach to take to the subject is to understand at the outset that neither school of thought can ignore the other and that a broader approach is needed. This means that the origin of the Grail story must be somewhere other than in popular legends or Christianized tales. Jessie L. Weston, after more than thirty years of study, wrote a little book entitled From Ritual to Romance. She noted therein an observation that was startling in its implications:
Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analyzed the tale, the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself whether it was not possible that this mysterious legend - mysterious alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a disappearance - we might not have the confused record of a ritual once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy? This would fully account for the atmosphere of awe and reverence, which even under distinctly non-Christian conditions never fails to surround the Grail. The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the more strongly one is impressed with the deeply and daringly spiritual character of its speculations, and the more doubtful it appears that such teaching can depend on the unaided processes of human thought, or can have been evolved from such germs as we find among the supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples. Are they really primitive? Or are we dealing, not with the primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization? Certainly, it is that so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race. The Folk practices and ceremonies studied - the dances, the rough Dramas, the local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the material out of which the AttisAdonis cult was formed, but surviving fragments of worship from which the higher significance has vanished. My aim has been to prove the essentially archaic character of all the elements composing the Grail story rather than analyzing the story as a connected whole
THE ANCIENT SECRET SCIENCE REVEALED
Let me repeat those two most important statements: The “disjecta membra of a vanished civilization”, and “surviving fragments of a worship from which the higher significance has vanished”. In short, what Ms. Weston has proposed is that the Grail Stories were a brief emergence into the general consciousness of something so ancient that finding the threads and re-weaving the whole cloth of the Sacred Tapestry might require a perspective of not merely thousands of years, but possibly tens of thousands of years - antediluvian, even! The very thought of something so daring in scope literally took my breath away. However, being naïve and something of a fool willing to rush in where angels fear to tread, I made the a decision that I was going to search for the pieces to this puzzle if it took me the rest of my life. Upon considering this idea as a hypothesis, I began to imagine how such an event might manifest. I came across another interesting item that helped me adjust the “lens” through which I was viewing reality. There is a story found in the History of Herodotus, which is an exact copy of an original tale of Indian origin except for the fact that in the original, it was an animal fable, and in Herodotus’ version, all the characters had become human. In every other detail, the stories are identical. Joscelyn Godwin quotes R. E. Meagher, professor of humanities and translator of Greek classics, saying: “Clearly if characters change species, they may change their names and practically anything else about themselves.” 22 Going further still, Mircea Eliade clarifies for us the process of the “mythicization” of historical personages. Eliade describes how a Romanian folklorist recorded a ballad describing the death of a young man bewitched by a jealous mountain fairy on the eve of his marriage. The young man, under the influence of the fairy, was driven off a cliff. The ballad of lament, sung by the fiancée, was filled with “mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty”. The folklorist, having been told that the song concerned a tragedy of “long ago”, discovered that the fiancée was still alive and went to interview her. To his surprise, he learned that the young man’s death had occurred less than 40 years before. He had slipped and fallen off a cliff; in reality, there was no mountain fairy involved. Eliade notes that “despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale”. Even though the tragedy had happened to one of their contemporaries, the death of a young man soon to be married “had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth”. The myth seemed truer, purer, than the prosaic event, because “it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny”. In the same way, a Yugoslavian epic poem celebrating a heroic figure of the fourteenth century, Marko Kraljevic, abolishes his historic identity, his life story is “reconstructed in accordance with the norms of myth”. His mother is a Vila, a fairy, as is his wife. He fights a three-headed dragon and kills it, fights with his brother, and kills him, all in conformity with classical mythic themes. The historic character of the persons celebrated in epic poetry is not in question, Eliade notes. “But their historicity does not long resist the corrosive action of mythicization.” A historic event, despite its importance, doesn’t remain in the popular memory intact.
“Myth is the last – not the first – stage in the development of a hero.” The memory of a real event survives perhaps three centuries at best, as the historic figure is assimilated to his mythical model and the event itself is blurred into a category of mythical actions. “This reduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes carried out by the consciousness of the popular strata in Europe almost down to our day, is performed in conformity with archaic ontology”, Eliade writes. “We have the right to ask ourselves if the importance of archetypes for the consciousness of archaic man, and the inability of popular memory to retain anything but archetypes, does not reveal to us something more than a resistance to history exhibited by traditional spirituality?”23 This mythicization of historical personages appears in exactly the same way in all times and cultures. As it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun”. Historical events are “assimilated” to the mythical archetype, and things that were never done by the hero are often assigned to him. Events, places, and other characteristics of the “larger and deeper” context are also “attached”.