Speaker 1
So again, i would say it, as i said in my other lectures about the arthur mythos, i think it reflects how the mythology of arthur, while it was interesting and supplied interesting images and incidents, it had sort of reached a point of exhaustion where it could no longer be seen as vital, or could no longer be seen as speaking to modern sensibilities, in this sort of cynical and disillusioned era of the 19 seventies. Now, at the same time that, i think you could say the grayl story was reaching this kind of dead end and becoming a sort of stale artifact or joke in the 19 seventies. At the same time, there was a totally different development happening in other media, which was the emergence of a new quest to attain the grail. So while some people were examining the grail as this kind of dead artifact of the past, others were taking it more seriously than ever, arguably more seriously than the people who wrote the mediaeval romances. So a new quest emerges to identify and locate the grail, and hence to possess it. But again, to do so by by finding it, not by understanding it. This new quest, like the popular culture references and depictions to the grail, like, say, tennyson's poem, this new quest does not treat the grail as essentially an enigma, but rather as a literal object. It loses this suggestion of esoteric meaning and symbolism, itis taken as a literal object to be obtained in the manner of the antiquarian search for ancient sites like troy. And in some ways, i think you could say this new quest for the holy grail is sort of the latest instantiation, the popularization of the antiquarian obsession of the 17 and 18 hundreds. So various candidates have been proposed, mainly around different countries of ousually, they have some kind of folkloric connection to the story of christ and maybe to certain miracles. And so they're seen as sort of miraculous relics. So there've been several candidates put forward, mainly in britain, and some others in spain and italy. They're usually not too difficult to debunk and to demonstrate as not old to be the literal holy grail. However, the the grail, the real grail, was still sought after by the notses. That is true. The nots, many notses were inspired by esotericism, hermeticism, and probably specifically also by wagner, to see the grail as something real and to be striven after in the text of this kind of mythology of german ness and arianness.