The Mystery of the Grail: Projections of the Grail

The Holy Grail has been a fascinating and enduring symbol that has captivated the imaginations of writers and artists for centuries. Its association with the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, as well as its spiritual and religious significance, has made it a rich and complex symbol that has been adapted into various forms of media, including cinema. There have been many films based on Arthurian mythology and the Grail Quest, with some staying close to the original source material while others have reinterpreted and extrapolated upon the symbolism of the Grail.

“The Silver Chalice” (1954), which marked Paul Newman's acting debut, provided a heavily Christianised interpretation of the Grail mythos set in 33 A.D Jerusalem, the Grail legend is used here as a narrative framework while the film is primarily focusing on the persecution of early Christians by Roman authorities.

In contrast, Eric Rohmer's 1978 film "Perceval le Gallois" closely adhered to the original written source material, which in this case was the work of Chrétien de Troyes, the first yet incomplete written source of the Grail legend.

The 1981 film "Excalibur" directed by John Boorman, whilst taking certain liberties with the original written source (such as combining Arthur and the Fisher King) demonstrates an evocative interpretation of the Grail legend that remains faithful to the essential spirit of the story. The film underscores the archetypal resonance of the Grail quest and successfully engages with many of the underlying themes and motifs found in the Grail material that predate the Christian era.

The musical “Camelot” was translated to film in 1967 with Richard Harris in the lead role of Arthur. This film, which received several Academy Awards, is celebrated for its extravagant and opulent set designs, costumes and memorable Broadway soundtrack. It has earned a place as both a classic of the musical genre and a cherished retelling of the King Arthur legend.

Acclaimed director Terry Gilliam known for his irreverent style as a member of the Monty Python troupe, has incorporated the Grail into two of his films. The first is the comical “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a satirical take on the Arthurian legend that employs absurdist humour to demystify the myth. In his later work, the 1991 comedy-drama “The Fisher King,” Gilliam takes a different approach, situating the story in modern-era New York and casting the Fisher King as a mentally unstable homeless man who embarks on a quest to find the Holy Grail in order to restore his life and reunite with his deceased wife. Despite his cynical modernist stylings, Gilliam's adaptations demonstrate an unbridled affection for the Grail legend's striking beauty and poetic power.

While the “Da Vinci Code” (2006) is not directly about the Holy Grail, this film is based on the idea that the Holy Grail is actually the bloodline of Jesus Christ, and it features a search for the "Grail" that takes the characters on a journey throughout Europe.

The legend of the Grail has been studied extensively by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, who developed the concept of the "mono myth" based on his analysis of this myth. This idea has since been used as a framework for storytelling in the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, which have gone on to inspire and influence countless other works.

This is just a brief overview of some of the films that have incorporated the Grail mythos. The vast number of films that have explored Arthurian legends or drawn inspiration from them provides strong evidence for Carl Jung's assertion that Grail mythology offers some of the most significant archetypal stories in Western culture.

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A Heinlein

Image: Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David

“Profane space differs from sacred space in that it has no fixed point or center from which to gain orientation. Profane space has no axis mundi, no cosmic tree or pillar leading to the heavens. This is the experience of modernity: people unable to locate a center.”
―Robert L. Moore

Notes: Many in modernity struggle to grasp this concept as they have been so exiled from a genuine spiritual or religious comprehension of the human experience. The modern secularised population tends to believe that a true centre does not actually exist, and thus, profane space becomes an intimidating, yet meaningless void that lacks a definitive fundamental reality.

Image: Yggdrasil by Theoretical Part

“It could be interpreted that the world we once knew no longer exists. Instead, we seem to be living in a shattered universe made up of countless fragmented places that are mostly neutral in nature. As human beings move through these places, they are governed and driven by the obligations of their existence, which are deeply embedded in the context of living within an industrial society.”
―Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Image: Dark City by Peter Pound

“Our ancestors believed in their gods, but had no “explanation” for what the gods were, or for their experience of the gods. Therefore, if we adopt the modern standpoint and insist upon explanation, we have removed ourselves even further from the standpoint of our ancestors. Indeed, we have negated it, and guaranteed that our desire to return to the gods will go unrealized.”
― Colin Cleary, Summoning the Gods

Image: Odin by Milivoj Ćeran

“When people think of myths they consider them fictitious, made-up fairy tales or adventure stories experienced by imaginary heroes in nonexistent countries which are products of fantasy and imagination. Both C.G. Jung, the famous psychologist, and the world-renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell have explored the meaning of myths and mythologies, and have shown that this interpretation of mythology is superficial and incorrect. Both men came to the conclusion that myths are manifestations of fundamental organising principles that exist within the cosmos that affect our lives on deeply personal and cultural levels.”
― Robert Blumetti, Vril: The Life Force of the Gods

Image: Prometheus by Jean Delville

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“While Wagner's Twilight of the Gods concludes in the most terminal and apocalyptic destruction, the only fate left to the decadent Iron Age civilization, Parsifal concludes on a note of maximum beauty and optimism, the last hope for redemption. And it is not for less, because with Parsifal a New Golden Age will be established.”
― The Arkadian, Richard Wagner: The Prophet of the Iron Age

Image: Parsifal by Odilon Redon

“The Warrior energy also shows what we can call a transpersonal commitment. His loyalty is to something—a cause, a god, a people, a task, a nation—larger than individuals, though that transpersonal loyalty may be focused through some important person, like a king. In the Arthurian stories, Lancelot, though fiercely devoted to Arthur and to Guinevere, is ultimately committed to the ideal of chivalry and to the God who lies behind such things as noble quests, “might for right,” and the lifting up of the oppressed.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

Image: Petar Meseldžija

“Even today, a religious festival can produce the rapture that Indians call anya manas, the ‘other mind’ that is quite different from normal, profane consciousness… emphasis on liturgy reminds us yet again that myth cannot be viewed in isolation from this context. Myth and cultic practice are equal partners, both help to convey a sense of the sacred, and usually do so together, but sometimes ritual takes first place… To understand the true meaning of the myth, you must not only perform the rites which give it emotional resonance, but you must also behave in the correct ethical manner.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History Of Myth

Image: Trizna by Andrey Shishkin

Notes: Trizna is a funeral feast within the Slavic religion, which is conducted for distinguished members of society before their cremation.

“Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.”
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil Dictionary

Image: The Holy Hour by Ludwig Fahrenkrog

“Nature never "fails." Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature's laws and a Man-contrived structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates that Man did not understand Nature's laws and behaviors. Nothing failed. Man's knowledge or estimating was inadequate.”
―Buckminster Fuller, How Little I Know, Saturday Review (1966)

Image: Natura Sonora by Tomás Sanchez

"Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal (Passover) month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month.”
― The Venerable Bede, The Reckoning of Time, 725

Notes: This quotation attributed to Saint Bede has been the subject of debate regarding its credibility as evidence for the existence of the pagan goddess Eostre. Some scholars have questioned the authenticity of Bede's account, arguing that he may have invented the Easter goddess. However, it should be noted that during the period the Christian Church was primarily focused on eradicating the Old Religion. It is therefore highly unlikely that a Christian monk would have fabricated a pagan goddess when his focus would have been on downplaying the Spring fertility goddess in favour of the resurrection of Christ. For more information on this subject check out Survive the Jive’s excellent short video (6 mins) on this subject.

Image: Spring by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

“The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara … Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian’s God.”
― Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology (1835)

Notes: The presence of pagan elements in Christian celebrations is not unusual, as pagan elements were co-opted and incorporating practices. In many cases, this ‘borrowing’ was intentional, as Christian missionaries sought to make their religion more accessible to those they were trying to convert.

The author and leading scholar of Anglo Saxon religion Brian Bates explores this tactic in his best selling book, The Way of Wyrd. In order to construct this historical fiction novel he conducted intense research as the framework he built his story around.

Image: Madonna of The Rabbit by Tiziano Vecelli

"Reality is pagan, man is pagan, nature is pagan.”
―Johnathan Bowden

Image: Úlfhéðnar by Christian Sloan Hall

“[Readers] may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages. They may learn something about their own relationship to the earth from a people who were truly conservationists. The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Notes: No literary work of equivalent scope and impact to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee exists that details the genocide of the Pre-Christian Pagan communities of Europe. The cultural and spiritual beliefs of the indigenous peoples of the Americas bear striking similarities to those of European societies, particularly in their recognition of the interdependence between life and the natural environment.

Image: Wisdom by Thomas Blackshear II

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Image: Starship troopers by Gordon C Davies

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley

Image: Brave New World by Emily Carroll

“Ye shall utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their idols with fire; and ye shall hew down the carved images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.”
—Deuteronomy, 12:2–3

Notes: Yahweh, identified by the Gnostics as the Lord Archon or Demiurge is a jealous god who demands that no other gods be honoured before him. This implies the existence of competing Pagan deities who pervade nature in all its forms. However, monotheism rejects these immanent powers and attempts to leave the earth void of divinity, subjecting its inhabitants to an off-planet landlord. By reclaiming our senses from the psychic assault of the archons and their earth bound proxies we can once again begin to remystify our world.

Image: Saint Boniface by Michael Godfrey

“The Druid name for the life force is nwyfre (pronounced “NOO-iv-ruh”). Nearly every other language on Earth has a word for it, too. The only languages that don’t are the ones spoken in the industrial nations of the modern West.

The banishing of the life force from the worldview of industrial society is no accident. The founders of modern materialist science fought hard to keep their newborn ideology free of any trace of the life force, and you can still reduce most scientists to spluttering indignation by mentioning it. Anything that strays too close to vitalism, as modern philosophers call the idea of a life force, comes in for unrelenting criticism.”
― John Michael Greer, The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth

Image: The Oath of the Druids by Daren Bader

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors."
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Image: Dante and Virgile (detail) by William Bouguereau