The cup that cheers

DAVID V. BARRETT on the tortuous myth of the Grail
The Discovery of the Grail by Andrew Sinclair, Century £16.99
THE HOLY GRAIL: fact or metaphor? Christian or heretical or pagan? The Church has always been deeply uncomfortable about the Grail, for several reasons. First, perhaps, through simple pique, because it didn't come up with the idea itself. Second, a matter of authority: the mythology of the Grail has always been well outside the control of the Church. Third, the most theological reason: the Grail symbolises the individual's quest for God. It dispenses with the entire panoply of the priesthood and Churchly hierarchy. In one of the very earliest Grail stories, the wounded Fisher King gains his spiritual sustenance from the wafers in the Grail, without a priest in sight to consecrate the Host or celebrate the Mass.
The usual image of the Grail is of a beautifullybejewelled chalice, supposedly used at the Last Supper, and then by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of the dying Jesus on the Cross. There have been plenty of claimants to this version of the Grail, in cathedrals and abbeys throughout Europe; but these are as likely to be genuine as all the fragments of the True Cross, the nails from the Crucifixion, phials of the blood of Christ or the foreskin of Jesus. These probably all originated at much the same time, those heady days of medieval pilgrimages to the sites of (highly lucrative) sacred relics.
In The Discovery of the Grail Andrew Sinclair points out that the Grail actually takes many forms in the early tales. In some it is a stone, whether green or black; in others it is a book. In Celtic and other mythology its forerunner was the cornucopia, the blessed horn of plenty. But most likely of all, the Grail in Chretien de Troyes' original story was simply a serving platter; the word grad almost certainly comes from gradalis, a tray or platter on which a meal was served in separate courses, rather than all at the same time. (We can safely discount the thesis of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln in their Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that sari graal, Holy Grail, should actually be read as sang real, Blood Royal.)
Sinclair follows the Grail through folklore, myth and history with an encyclopaedic meticulousness. But it's this very mass of information which is the main problem with the book.
Sinclair pours it all down on the page, myth after legend, historical fact after historical fancy, with almost no linking comment. For any reader not already well versed in the matter of the Grail it must be almost incomprehensible.
He draws some links with the troubadours of medieval France, with the Cathars, with the Knights Templar, but he fails to emphasise the crucial significance of the vast pool of heterodox thinking of that period.
The troubadours were much more than the semiliterate wandering minstrels he describes; they were the primary link between the conventional Catholic society of the time and the developing Jewish mystical (Cabbalistic), Christian mystical (Gnostic) and Islamic mystical (Sufi) teachings stemming from the Languedoc (now southern France), northern Spain and Northern Italy, that whole huge melting pot of peoples and religions and culture and thought which effectively brought the Renaissance there a couple of centuries before the rest of Europe struggled out of the Middle Ages. All of this was smashed beyond recovery in the Albigensian Crusade.
Sinclair's book is a valuable compendium of Grail sources (though one might wish he had footnoted his many quotations), and a useful history of the pursuit of the Grail through the centuries. But for anyone wishing to delve more deeply into the mystical symbolism of the Grail, which, really, is what it's all about, books by Richard Cavendish and especially by John Matthews are a far more worthwhile read.
As Cavendish says, "it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the light of the Grail is the radiance of the Divine Presence"; this spiritual wonder is perhaps what is most missing from Sinclair's otherwise most thorough book.