5min chapter

Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrong cover image

Myth of the Month 19: The Holy Grail -- pt. 1

Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrong

CHAPTER

The Fisher King and the Grail

There are multiple resonances here, pulled together by this enigmatic story of the fisher king. The grail dish can be seen as complementary, as a janic symbol complementing the phalic symbol of the lance. Each one is connected, in its different way, to virility and to fertility, and hence, to the perpetuation of life. And so the healing of the fisher King is not just the healing of his personal health and vitality, but also of his erility and his ability to carry on the dynasty.

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And i think that image is such a beautiful in captulation of the sense of liberation of o being freed from danger, being freed from a trap, and then mming free. And the question is, freed from what? Freed from sin? Maybe this is about grace, redeeming some one from sin, freedom from evil, from danger, freedom, maybe from mortality, from the trap of death. But there are clearly multiple resonances here, pulled together by this enigmatic story of the fisher king. And as i said, there's the complex sexual symbolism, which is most obvious when it comes to the lance, which is a palic symbol. And the grail dish can be seen, then as complementary, as a janic symbol complementing the phalic symbol of the lance. And each one is connected, in its different way, to virility and to fertility, and hence, to the perpetuation of life. The fisher king sis lame because he was wounded in the thigh. And as i mention, that is often used in the middle ages as a euphemism for the genitals, and hence the loss of sexual ability. And as i said, wolfram actually explicitly says it was an injury to his genitals. And so the healing of the fisher king is not just the healing of his personal health and vitality, but also of his erility and his ability to carry on the dynasty, which is at an end unless percival can step in and replace him. And the land, by extension, is infertile. And this is a theme that also grows and develops through the tales the land is infertile. It's a waste land or a wilderness. And asking the question of the grail specifically brings the land back to and hence restores fertility to the land. So in this way, you can see, again, a complementarity, a sort of mirror image, between the king who must have his virility restored and the land that must have its fertility restored. And the grail, in this way, arguably is a metaphor for the land. The lance represents the the ruler, male ruler, his phalus. The grail represents the land, and it draws the the ga. The grail is associated with femininity, with fertility, with saint mary. It is carried through the grail procession by a maiden like mary. And in the vulgate cycle, the final grail mass, when we are told explicitly about a eucharistic mass with the grail, its called a mass of the mother of god. So it's a mass that is dedicated to mary. So you can see the complementarity of the grail and the lance, and the linking of the lance and the grail symbolizing the marriage, not not only the literal marriage of a man and a woman, but also the symbolic the spiritual marriage of the ruler and the country, which are mutually protective, sustaining. And this is finally also realized then visibly in the vulgate cycle when the lance is used to drip blood into the grail, which i think you can see as a sort of spiritualized sexual uniono and the last symbol which is really, i think, hiding in plain sight, which i haven't seen any one comment on much, that i want toe s is the name of the original grail hero, percival, which, of course, in the french is percival. And as as others, like richard barber have pointed out, there is clearly an implication here. The name is composed of two french words, persval, pierce's valley, right? So it can be taken to mean the the knight who pierces the valley, right? And again, the grail castle is set in a low, flat valley, which echoes the shallow, wide open dish of the grail. And percival is the one who enters successfully into the valley and then achieves the grail itself at the same time. Tha, as i said, there's this sexual undertone of sexual symbolism to the land and to the grail. So you can understand the, if you understand the gral as similar to the female body, orth symbolically the fertility of the female body, then pierces the valley. Need i say more? There's again this, this sort of veiled reference, i think, to sexual union. And then thirdly, i would also point out beyond that the name persival can be to mean pierces the valley, but it also sounds extremely close to another phrase, voil, means veil. So i think, you know, with a slight emendation, if you say, well, it sounds like persevoil, that means the one who pierces the veil. And piercing the veil is a metaphor that's used all through esoteric ature and philosophy to mean seeing behind the appearances of things, seeing through to the true, underlying reality, and specifically, to learning the actual meanings, the secrets behind symbols and codes.

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