by Steven Sora
Britain had not yet outgrown its own pagan roots, but it shared one thing with Israel—foreign oppression. Britain and Israel both had the need for a king. The Jews wanted an earthly king to emancipate their people from Rome, as Britain needed one who would free the Britons from Roman and then Saxon oppression. The earthly Jesus failed to liberate Israel from Rome and died in his mission. His empty tomb offered the hope of his return. The Camelot of Arthur, too, failed to last. In legend Arthur was wounded and carried away, presumably to return again.
The similarities of Jesus and Arthur do not end there. As the mysterious magician Merlin had prepared the way for Arthur, Saint John had prepared the way for Jesus. Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, was named for a great white goddess and was considered unfaithful by the Grail writers. The companion of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, whose symbol, the dove, is reminiscent of the goddess Isis, was also regarded as a sinner and a prostitute by later Christian writers. As women attended to Jesus in his tomb and were the first to reveal that he had departed, so also would women deliver the wounded Arthur from the last battle and take him to Avalon by boat.
Hundreds of books have been written that show the comparisons among the Celtic myth cycle, the life of Arthur, and the life of Jesus. It is not coincidence that the Prieuré de Sion families and their commissioned writers strove to identify the connection. The Grail romances served to bring back the higher purpose in life. The Arthurian quest for the Grail can be compared to the Greek search for personal excellence, arete. It was the quest for the Grail that was important, rather than the attainment of the Grail. Greek devotion, too, was never fulfilled, yet always strived for. Jesus taught in a similar vein. The law was made for man and woman not man and woman for the law. One’s highest goal was the love of God and neighbor for its own sake.
These values were not part of church or state in the medieval age; the Grail literature was an attempt to revive them. Bringing all religions together was one step—the Freemason credo of worshiping any supreme deity was an example. And bringing the true message of Christ to the world through the Grail literature was another. But there was still a third step—incorporating the older beliefs into the modern. Celtic Christianity still had one foot in the world of Druids, vegetation gods, and mysterious magicians.
The strange character of Merlin formed a bridge between the misty Celtic past and the medieval age. Once the “wild man,” the “Green George” of the Britains, Merlin became almost Christianized. Merlin’s birth story is even stranger than that of John the Baptist, who was born to a “barren” mother. As revenge for Christ’s victory over hell, a demon is sent to torment a religious family.28 The family, already bankrupt, has nothing left save three daughters. The demon compromises the chastity of the youngest two but is resisted by the third. This oldest daughter, still a virgin, is raped by the demon on a night that she has forgotten her evening prayers. The child Merlin is born—a human, but completely covered with black hair. Such tales are symbolic devices, although their full meaning has been lost in time. The Frankish Merovingians had their own odd tale about their ancestor, Merovee, who was miraculously conceived by both a king and a sea creature.
The Welsh patron saint is David (Dewi in Welsh), which means “waterman.”29 The calling of the waterman in Christian Wales was to baptize the Welsh people. Saint John’s mission was also to baptize. The name John stems from the Greek “Ionnes,” which in turn derives from the Babylonian “Oannes.” Oannes was a half-man, half–sea creature who brought civilization to the ancestors. The name Merlin also has water connotations in that mer means “sea” and lin often has a water meaning as well (pool). What ancient tradition unites these three watermen? Modern humans may never know. Almost every culture has a legend of a man bringing civilization who arrives from the sea. From the Incas and Mayans to Native Americans to Egyptians and Babylonians, a stranger arriving from over the water gives human beings the arts of building, writing, agriculture, and healing. The waterman is always the civilizer. Were Merlin, Merovee, and John outgrowths from shared myths?
The Masonic explanation of their tradition is that Solomon himself, the king who built the temple, founded a secret society of Masons that survived through three millennia. A more likely aim of Freemasons, Rosicrucians, the “Invisible College,” and other such orders was to create a more free society. Europe was a melting pot of peoples—Christian and pagan, Asian, Islamic, and Celtic. State governments and religions tried to deal with such differences by imposing a regime of vicious repression. The Roman Church and the Norman state together made dissension very dangerous.
Europe was just entering into the Dark Ages. Barbarian invaders from the west finally turned back at the Battle of Troyes in A.D. 451, and the Huns were stopped. But it was too late for the Roman Empire, which had given way to successive hordes of Visigoths, Vandals, and the Frank-ish Merovingians who ruled western Europe. The Norse Vikings and the Norman invaders ruled the British Isles and parts of Europe. The conquerors practiced domination by death and mutilation and ushered in one of the cruelest ages in modern times. Statecraft and churchcraft meant torture and execution for those who refused taxation and uncompromising obedience. The taxing state offered no protection of law to its oppressed citizens, only war. The Church, too, offered no earthly reward and comfort and instead forced upon the people taxation and conscription to its religious wars.
Even the oppressors themselves were oppressed, since kings and the elite handful of families that governed Europe could easily be ostracized by mean-spirited popes whose decrees of excommunication would lead to an invitation to be attacked by neighboring enemies. For kings who decided to question the doctrines of religion, which included intolerance, the risks were great. But there were certain places where the candle of learning would not be dimmed. The monastaries of Ireland saw the books of the world preserved and copied. In Islamic Spain there were great advancements in medicine, mathematics, and other sciences. And in the north of France, the city of Troyes somehow emerged as a learning center, where new ideas were welcomed. The bishop Lupus created a library that guarded two hundred thousand volumes and three thousand original manuscripts. And this learning center also condoned freedom from religious persecution.
The counts of Champagne invited Jews fleeing from Spain to emigrate to France. The rabbi Solomon Isaac, who is given credit for having preserved the Talmud, was born there in 1025.30 Rashi, as he was called, started a yeshiva that attracted scholars from all over the world. His school was not limited to Jews, and it is said that he had the French priests singing in Hebrew. Hebrew teachings at the time included an esoteric set of mystical teachings, the Cabala, which had come to France and Spain through the Diaspora, the migration of Jews fleeing the revolts in A.D. 70 that saw the destruction of the temple. The quickest way to exit Israel was via the Mediterranean Sea, and the Cabala traveled first west and then spread north. It was not meant to be taught to everyone but only to a learned few. To this elite were given the secrets behind the written language, the cipher for interpreting the meanings were hiding in the letters. The Cabala had very strong ties to the teachings of the Essenes. Among the Essenes, too, only a select few were able to receive the sacred teachings. The Essenes hold central the idea of a “teacher of righteousness,” who was a “nezer”—a “sprout” in the sacred bloodline.
Max Dimont, a modern scholar, writer, and student of the Jewish people past and present, calls cabalism the “subterranean stream underneath the Torah.” It mixes faith with reason, logic, and science, to bring human beings close to their deity.31 But not everyone.
Science and writing were pursuits of an elite few. In medieval times writing was a craft dominated by the Church and the state. Those who could write were in the employ of one or the other. Writers outside the mainstream risked being branded as heretics, traitors, or witches. But even those in power soon grew weary of the corruption. It was a noble class, not above corruption itself, that commissioned the Arthurian romances. The same families that ban
ded together in the Prieuré de Sion, which brought about the creation of the Templars, were the ones to commission the works of Arthur and the history of an idealistic, if also mysterious world.
Even Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing from England, was not outside their realm. Geoffrey was the first to truly elaborate on King Arthur. He dedicated his History of the Kings of Britain, written in about 1135, to the English king Stephen, a grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen of Blois had sworn fealty to Matilda, daughter of Henry I, but then took the English throne himself. Matilda married Geoffrey IV of Anjou and had a son (Henry II) who was later named as Stephen’s heir. It is this Geoffrey IV who gave the family of the counts of Anjou their surname, Plantagenet—the flowering shoot of the royal bloodline.
Geoffrey of Monmouth had placed the Arthur story in the south of England; later French writers, and rivals, would relocate the Arthurian romances to France. Geoffrey died in 1155.32 Shortly afterward the entire body of Grail literature came into being. Most of the Grail works were completed in a fifty-year period, from 1180 to 1230.33 Lancelot, written by Chrétien de Troyes, was commissioned by Marie de Champagne. Marie’s mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose second husband was Henry Plantagenet, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. When Chrétien followed the dictates of Marie, says the prolific Grail historian, Norma Lorre Goodrich, he was not being true to his sources, and the result did not “work.”34 To set a historical Welsh-British king in a medieval background subverts both history and art, as the story is contorted to fit the dictates of the master.
The real Guinevere was a warrior queen, but she becomes reduced in status to a level that suited the life of the countess of Champagne. Guinevere was a Pict, and in her culture she could pick and choose husbands at will and dismiss them as easily. In courtly Troyes, countesses and queens alike were often married without their consent, resigned to their loveless marriages, and unable to do anything about their plights. Guinevere, who could, is considered unfaithful when she has a love affair with the knight Lancelot. Her “desertion” of Arthur is considered adultery in the Troyes version.35
The reader of Chrétien is also left without an understanding of why the knight Lancelot brings a severed head to his princess. Just as their ancestors preserved the heads of bears whom they had hunted, the Celts kept alive the custom in preserving the heads of important enemy chiefs. The Norman reader of the twelfth century, seven hundred years after the historic Arthur, may not have understood the custom. Chrétien may have understood it since he was more well-read than his readers, and he may have included such old customs to be true to the source. But the dilution of the Celtic mystical history that was required to please his wealthy patron could be the reason Lancelot was left incomplete. Goodrich believes that Chrétien simply lost heart.
Did Chrétien de Troyes finally decide to leave behind his Arthurian works and the employ of Marie of Champagne? In 1188 he died, from unknown causes, and a mysterious fire destroyed most of his work and his sources. We can only wonder if either of the two events was the result of a falling out. One year before his death, in 1187, Jerusalem fell to the Saracens. Many blamed the Templar order. The stress of the loss and the tide of popular opinion hurt the order. The secret organization of the French families behind the Knights Templar split with the knights.
The Lorraine families most likely still exercised some control, but disassociated themselves publicly with the group.
There is little way of shedding light on a death that is eight hundred years old, but we know that if Chrétien’s patrons were unhappy with his refusal to finish the work in the style demanded, there were others who would proceed without the baggage of conscience. He could easily be replaced. Just before his death he had been told to place certain genealogies in his works. This act became a trend in later Grail romances. It was two years after his death that Robert de Boron introduced the genealogy of Perceval, which extended from Joseph of Arimathea.36
Robert de Boron, the successor of Chrétien, is suspected of having been the new tool of the elite Prieuré de Sion in their attempt to create their own legitimacy as kings and inheritors of the sacred bloodline. It is Robert who cites the Holy Grail as a sacred item removed from a hostile foreign land to the protection of new guardians. It is from this writer as well that we learn of a new Grail castle being built to protect the sacred cup. Was the Prieuré de Sion documenting its ownership of a sacred object that had been removed from the temple in Jerusalem?
If we interpret the Holy Grail as the sacred bloodline, the Grail itself may comprise the documents, the written genealogies of the David-Jesus family. De Boron says the Grail was taken to an isolated land 454 years after the death of Christ. Since it is said in certain legends that the family of Jesus had escaped immediately after the Crucifixion, what happened four centuries later? That brings us to the time of the Visigoths’ entry into southern France. The Visigoths brought to France items stolen from Rome, which had been looted from Jerusalem. These items were secured at or near their capital at Rennes-le-Chateau.
In the same way the Cabala is written for certain readers to understand on a surface level and for initiated readers to take greater meaning, so were the works of the Prieuré de Sion. The knight Perceval is called the “son of a widow,” a term that has very important meaning for the secretive Masonic society.37 As mentioned, it carries the connotation of a fellow Mason and is used when one Mason requires assistance from another. In the Conte del Graal, another Chrétien tale that was finished by unknown writers, Perceval is likened to the Saracen “Mahdi,” the “De-sired Knight” who can cure others. Both Jesus and Perceval were considered the Desired Knights, and both had the power to heal. Mahdi as “mahadia” survives as another secret Masonic word.38
A few years after Chrétien and Robert de Boron, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a knight from Germany, wrote about the most mysterious Perceval of all, in Parzival. He places his story in Poitou. Wolfram had very carefully planned his work, down to the mathematics of the number of chapters, leaving us to wonder about the hidden messages. Poitou was part of the domain of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry of Anjou, and Wolfram was writing with his patrons in mind. He claims the most complicated genealogy of the Grail romances, with Perceval’s father descending from Arthur and his mother descending from two Grail kings, Frimutel and Titurel. And he openly uses the terms “Templar” and “Knights Templar” enough to make one wonder if he was perhaps making a late attempt at public relations for this out-of-favor order.
Wolfram also tells of Perceval’s sister, Sigune, who is amazed at how little the Desired Knight knows. He had seen the bloody spear that was used to ensure that Jesus was dead, the silver platter that held the body of Christ, the Host and the Grail that represented the chalice with the blood of Christ. He had met the Fisher King, the wounded God/King who could no longer rule. Sigune wonders how it was that her brother failed to understand the implications of all he had seen. His uncle, described as a hermit, had told Perceval that Christ himself had prophesied that Perceval would inherit the job of keeper of the Grail. Wolfram’s was the boldest Grail story in the way that he informed us of the Templars, those other desired knights, and that the temple in his time may have been in the south of France.39
The customs of the Grail fellowship dictated that they were to be part of a secret society. Since the Templars themselves were not yet outlawed, and not a “secret” society, it could have been the Prieuré de Sion, the order within an order, that was the “secret society.” In this society, the few who were admitted were never allowed to declare their genealogies. In twelfth century Europe one very logical impediment to declaring a genealogy would be if it was rooted in a Jewish ancestry. While being able to claim a link to David or Joseph of Arimathea might have seemed an honor, it also could lay some of the wealthiest families in France open to suspicion and persecution.
Marie de France also reiterated that the Grail keepers had to conceal their genealogies. Was the lack of understanding on Perceval’s
part his failure to see or accept his Jewishness? Wolfram seems to confirm that point. He said that the original Grail castle was in the Pyrennes, the land of Septimania—the land that was owned by William de Gellone. William, we remember, was a contemporary of Charlemagne, of the usurper dynasty of Carolingians that replaced the Merovingians. This new line of regents did all they could to legitimize their king-ship. Charlemagne’s son married William’s daughter. Through such strategic marriages, William’s family became the connection between the Visigoth and Merovingian royalty in the south and the Plantard family, the root of the Plantagenet kings. Further marriages drew the Alsace-Lorraine families into the bloodline.40 The family of William owned the land surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau and the castle of Blanchefort.
Wolfram went out of his way to correct assertions made by Chrétien, who had fallen out of favor with his patrons. He gives credit to his own sources, who were from the south of France and from Spain. One important source is Kyot of Provence (a well-known master in Book IX of Parzival ), who had “found” the true history of the Grail in Toledo, Spain.41 The story had been recorded by a Hebrew scholar who had become Christianized but whose family seemed neither Jewish nor Christian. The father of the Hebrew scholar, Flegetanis, worshiped a calf, and Flegetanis himself studied the Cabala. He understood how the stars rose and set and how they determined the lives of human beings. The Grail, he said, was read in the constellations.
Wolfram also said that there were a few Christianized noblemen in the service of the Grail charged with the obligation of being the Grail keepers. If we substitute the idea of the Grail as a Celtic cauldron or a chalice with the concept of the Grail as a body of knowledge, it makes more sense. This knowledge then is preserved and passed down through history by an elite handful known as the guardians. Among the Jews, that body of knowledge deals with astronomical secrets, possibly so complex that they are understood by only a few rabbis, who study and memorize this sacred knowledge over the course of years so that they can function in the role of guardian. These same secrets may lie behind the more “orthodox” form of Judaism and combine with the astronomy from the land of the Magi, Buddhist doctrine (which may have been inherited by the Essenes), and Celtic religion from a time when the Celts ranged from India to Ireland. In Britain and Gaul such secrets had been kept and preserved by the Druids, secrets, so complex that it took a lifetime to commit them to memory. To the uninitiated, part of the mystery could be told in the same form most religion and history was passed along—in myths, parables, and folktales.
