The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  The first thing that attracted my attention was the way in which Wolfram had transformed Chrétien’s Grail cup – or vessel – into a stone. It occurred to me that the French poet’s description of the Grail had been sufficiently vague and mystical to allow Wolfram to impose an identity on it, to mould his predecessor’s rather imprecise concept of a sacred receptacle into a shape that suited his own purposes – in short to define that receptacle by speaking not directly of it but of its contents.

  The Ark of the Covenant was, after all, a receptacle too, and it did indeed contain a stone – or rather two stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments had been inscribed by the finger of God. I therefore found it intriguing that Wolfram’s Grail, like the Tablets of the Law, bore – from time to time – the imprint of a celestial script which set out certain rules.55

  There were other such coincidences – for example, the oracular function that the Grail played for the community that depended on it:

  We fell on our knees before the Gral, where suddenly we saw it written that a knight would come to us and were he heard to ask a Question there, our sorrows would be at an end; but that if any child, maiden or man were to forewarn him of the Question it would fail in its effect, and the injury would be as it was and give rise to deeper pain. ‘Have you understood?’ asked the Writing. ‘If you alert him it could prove harmful. If he omits the question on the first evening, its power will pass away. But if he asks his Question in season he shall have the Kingdom.’56

  The Ark, too, frequently served as an oracle, dispensing advice that was crucial to the survival of the Israelites. In the book of Judges, for example, where the identity of God Himself was often completely fused with that of the Ark, I found this passage:

  And the children of Israel enquired of the Lord, (for the Ark of the Covenant of God was there in those days, and Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, stood before it in those days), saying Shall I yet again go out to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother, or shall I cease?’ And the Lord said, Go up: for tomorrow I will deliver them into thine hand.57

  I also came across a much later biblical passage which stated that it had become rare for the Ark actually to speak and that ‘visions’ were now ‘uncommon’. Nevertheless, as the prophet Samuel lay down ‘in the house of the Lord, where the Ark of God was’, a voice issued forth from the sacred relic warning: ‘Behold, I will do a thing in Israel at which both the ears of everyone that heareth it shall tingle.’58

  Neither were utterances and visions the only ways in which the Ark communicated its oracular messages. Like the Grail, it also used the written word from time to time – notably to impart to King David the blueprint for the Temple that his son Solomon was to build.59

  The weight of sin, the golden calf, and stones from heaven

  As my research progressed I discovered many other shared characteristics linking the Grail to the Ark – and particularly to the Tablets of Stone. One example concerned the way in which the weight of the relic seemed to be spiritually controlled. According to Wolfram: ‘the Gral [while it may be carried by the pure of heart] is so heavy that sinful mortals could not lift it from its place.’60

  In this, I thought there might well be a connection to an ancient Jewish legend which described the moment when the prophet Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the Tablets of Stone, then freshly inscribed with the divine words of the Ten Commandments. As he came into camp the prophet caught the children of Israel in the act of worshipping the golden calf, a sin so unspeakable that:

  All at once he saw the writing vanish from the tablets, and at the same time became aware of their enormous weight; for while the celestial writing was upon them they carried their own weight and did not burden Moses, but with the disappearance of the writing all this changed.61

  In Wolfram’s cryptic prose the golden calf, too, made an appearance. It did so, moreover, in a context so crucial that I felt certain that the author was using it quite deliberately to convey a message – a message further identifying the Grail with the Ark:

  There was a heathen named Flegetanis [I read in Chapter 9 of Parzival] who was highly renowned for his acquirements. This same physicus was descended from Solomon, begotten of Israelitish kin all the way down from ancient times … He wrote of the marvels of the Gral. Flegetanis, who worshipped a calf as though it were his god, was a heathen by his father … [and] was able to define for us the recession of each planet and its return, and how long each revolves in its orbit before it stands at its mark again. All human kind are affected by the revolutions of the planets. With his own eyes the heathen Flegetanis saw – and he spoke of it reverentially – hidden secrets in the constellations. He declared there was a thing called the Gral, whose name he read in the stars without more ado. ‘A troop [of Angels] left it on earth and then rose high above the stars, as if their innocence drew them back again.’62

  To my mind what was really important about this passage was the way in which it used Flegetanis (with his intriguingly Solomonic and Jewish/pagan background) to signal an astral origin for the Grail.

  Why important? Simply because some of the most serious biblical scholarship that I studied argued that the Tablets of Stone contained within the Ark of the Covenant had, in reality, been two pieces of a meteorite.63 Neither was this merely some latter-day interpretation that could not have been shared by Moses and by the Levitical priests who attended the Ark. On the contrary, since ancient times, Semitic tribes such as the children of Israel had been known to venerate stones that ‘fell from heaven’.64

  The best illustration of this custom, since it had continued into modern times, was the special reverence accorded by Muslims to the sacred Black Stone built into a corner of the wall of the Ka’aba in Mecca. Kissed by every pilgrim making the Haj to the holy site, this stone was declared by the Prophet Muhammad to have fallen from heaven to earth where it was first given to Adam to absorb his sins after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden; later it was presented by the angel Gabriel to Abraham, the Hebrew Patriarch; finally it became the cornerstone of the Ka’aba – the ‘beating heart’ of the Islamic world.65

  Geologists, I learned, unhesitatingly attributed a meteoric origin to the Black Stone.66 Likewise the pairs of sacred stones, known as betyls, that some pre-Islamic Arab tribes carried on their desert wanderings were believed to have been aerolites – and it was recognized that a direct line of cultural transmission linked these betyls (which were often placed in portable shrines) with the Black Stone of the Ka’aba and with the stone Tablets of the Law contained within the Ark.67

  I then discovered that betyls had been known in medieval Europe as lapis betilis – a name:

  stemming from Semitic origins and taken over at a late date by the Greeks and Romans for sacred stones that were assumed to possess a divine life, stones with a soul [that were used] for divers superstitions, for magic and for fortunetelling. They were meteoric stones fallen from the sky.68

  In such a context, I found it hard to believe that Wolfram had merely been indulging in flights of fancy when he had specified a meteoric origin for his Grail-Stone. Not only did he use his character Flegetanis to this end but also, a few pages further on, he provided a strange alternative name for the Grail – ‘Lapsit exillis’.69 Although I came across a variety of interpretations for the real meaning of this pseudo-Latin epithet,70 the most plausible by far was that it had been derived from lapis ex caelis (‘stone from heaven’), lapsit ex caelis (‘it fell from heaven’), or even lapis, lapsus ex caelis, ‘stone fallen from heaven’.71 At the same time it seemed to me that the bastardized words Lapsit exillis were quite close enough to lapis betilis to raise the suspicion that the German poet had intended a deliberate – and characteristically cryptic – pun.

  Benedictions, supernatural light, and the power of choice

  Another and quite different area of comparison lay in Wolfram’s repeated descriptions of the Grail as a source of blessing and fertility for those pur
e-hearted people who came into contact with it. To cite one example amongst many,72 I found this passage in Chapter 5 of Parzival:

  Whatever one stretched out one’s hand for in the presence of the Gral, it was waiting, one found it all ready and to hand – dishes warm, dishes cold, new-fangled dishes and old favourites … for the Gral was the very fruit of bliss, a cornucopia of the sweets of this world.73

  It seemed to me quite probable that this description echoed an ancient Talmudic commentary which had it that:

  When Solomon brought the Ark into the Temple, all the golden trees that were in the Temple were filled with moisture and produced abundant fruit, to the great profit and enjoyment of the priestly guild.74

  I found an even closer correspondence between the Ark and the Grail in the otherworldly luminescence said to have been given off by both objects. The Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple (where the Ark was installed before it mysteriously vanished) was a place of ‘thick darkness’ according to the Bible.75 Talmudic sources recorded, however, that: ‘The High Priest of Israel entered and left by the light that the Holy Ark issued forth’ – a convenient state of affairs that changed after the relic disappeared. From then on the Priest ‘groped his way in the dark’.76

  The Ark, therefore, was a source of paranormal lambency: a dazzling radiance was emitted by it – as numerous biblical passages confirmed.77 In similar fashion Chrétien’s Grail, which I thought that Wolfram had been happy to accept (because it provided the receptacle part of the Ark cipher that he then completed with his Stone), sent out a radiance ‘so great … that … candles lost their brilliance just as the stars do at the rising of the sun or moon.’78

  Chrétien’s Grail was likewise made of ‘pure gold’79 while the Ark was ‘overlaid with pure gold, within and without’80 and was covered with a lid (known as the ‘mercy seat’) which was also ‘of pure gold’.81 But it was not from this precious metal that Ark and Grail derived their light-generating quality; rather this was the product of their shared impregnation with a fiery celestial energy. And it was this same energy (cast forth by the Tablets of Stone after the Ten Commandments had been inscribed upon them by the finger of God) that caused Moses’ face to shine with an eerie, supernatural brilliance when he descended from Mount Sinai:

  As he came down from the mountain, Moses had the two Tablets of the Testimony in his hands. He did not know that the skin on his face was radiant … And when Aaron and all the sons of Israel saw Moses, the skin on his face shone so much that they would not venture near him.82

  I therefore thought it not entirely coincidental that Wolfram’s Grail-Stone, on its very first appearance in Parzival, was carried in procession in the hands of a certain Repanse de Schoye whose face ‘shed such refulgence that all imagined it was sunrise.’83

  The heaven-destined hero

  Repanse de Schoye was a ‘Princess’84 and was also ‘of perfect chastity’.85 Her most important characteristic, however, was that the Grail had chosen her: ‘She whom the Gral suffered to carry itself’, Wolfram explained, ‘had the name Repanse de Schoye … By her alone, no other I am told, did the Gral let itself be carried.’86

  Such phrases seemed to imply that the relic possessed a kind of sentience. And linked to this was another quality: ‘No man can win the Gral,’ Wolfram stated in Chapter 9 of Parzival, ‘other than one who is acknowledged in Heaven as destined for it.’87 The same point was then forcefully reiterated in Chapter 15: ‘No man could ever win the Gral by force, except the one who is summoned there by God.’88

  These two notions – of the Grail exercising powers of choice and of it being a prize to be won only by those who were ‘Heaven-destined’ – were of great importance in Wolfram’s overall scheme of things. I concluded, moreover, that precedents were provided for both of them in biblical descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant. In Numbers 10:33, for instance, it chose the route that the children of Israel were to take through the desert, and it also determined where they should camp. Meanwhile in the book of Chronicles there was this example of certain individuals being ‘Heaven-destined’ for the Ark:

  None ought to carry the Ark of God but the Levites; for them hath the Lord chosen to carry the Ark of God and to minister unto it.89

  It was not in the Bible, however, that I found the closest correspondences between the Ark of the Covenant and Wolfram’s sentient, Heaven-destined Grail. These came rather in the Kebra Nagast, which told the story of the Ark’s abduction to Ethiopia. In Sir E. A. Wallis Budge’s authoritative English translation90 I came across this passage in which the sacred relic was referred to almost as though it were a feminine person (who, like all ladies, could change her mind):

  And as for what thou sayest concerning the going of the Ark of the Covenant to their city, to the country of Ethiopia, if God willed it and she herself willed it, there is no one who could prevent her; for of her own will she went and of her own will she will return if God pleaseth.91

  Next I noted the following strange references which seemed to imply that the relic possessed intelligence and also that the honour of keeping it was granted as a result of heavenly predestination:

  The Ark goeth of its own free will whithersoever it wisheth, and it cannot be removed from its seat if it does not desire it.92

  Without the Will of God the Ark of God will not dwell in any place.93

  But the chosen ones of the Lord are the people of Ethiopia. For there is the habitation of God, the heavenly ZION,94 the Ark of His Covenant.95

  Last but not least, in Chapter 60 of the Kebra Nagast, I found a lengthy lamentation supposedly uttered by Solomon when he learned that the Ark had been abducted by his son Menelik from the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the moment of his bitterest grief an angel appeared to him and asked:

  ‘Why art thou thus sorrowful? For this hath happened by the Will of God. The Ark hath … been given … to thy first-born son …’ And the King was comforted by this word, and he said, ‘The will of God be done and not the will of man.’96

  Could this not be, I wondered, exactly what had been in Wolfram’s mind when he had written that ‘no man could ever win the Gral by force except the one who is summoned there by God’? In other words, if the Grail was indeed a cryptogram for the Ark then might not the prototype for the German poet’s ‘Heaven-destined’ hero have been none other than Menelik himself?

  To answer this question I read Parzival again. I was not looking, however, for literary influences from the Kebra Nagast – as Helen Adolf had done – but rather for the presence of explicit clues embedded within the text which pointed in the direction of Ethiopia. I wanted to know whether there was there anything at all to suggest that Ethiopia might in fact be Wolfram’s mysterious Terre Salvaesche97 – the land of the Grail and, therefore, by implication, the land of the Ark.

  Chapter 4

  A Map to Hidden Treasure

  My readings of Parzival during the spring and summer of 1989 had brought a startling possibility to my attention: the fictional object known as the Holy Grail could have been devised to serve as a complex symbol for the Ark of the Covenant. This in turn had led me to formulate another hypothesis – namely that behind Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Heaven-destined Grail hero, there might lie another figure who, once recognized, would point the way to the heart of the mystery of the whereabouts of the Ark – a figure whose real identity the poet had therefore disguised beneath layers of arcane and sometimes deliberately misleading details. This figure, I suspected, might be none other than Menelik I – the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon who, according to Abyssinian legends, had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. If there was anything at all to this speculation, I reasoned, then I might hope to find further clues embedded in Parzival – cryptic clues that might be obscured by frequent false trails, that might be scattered here and there amongst widely separated chapters, that might be calculatedly vague and ambiguous, but that would, nevertheless, serve to reinforce the Ethiopian connection
if only they could be gathered together and made sense of.

  Ebony and ivory

  I found the first of these clues early in the text of Parzival in a chapter which spoke of a far-off land called ‘Zazamanc’ where the people ‘were all as dark as night’.1 To this land came a wandering European aristocrat, ‘Gahmuret of Anjou’,2 and there he fell in love with no lesser personage than the queen – ‘sweet and constant Belacane’.3

  In ‘Belacane’ I could not help but hear an echo of ‘Makeda’, the Ethiopian name for the Queen of Sheba that I had first become acquainted with when I had visited Axum in 1983. I was also aware that this same monarch had been known in Muslim tradition as Bilquis.4 Since I was by this time quite familiar with Wolfram’s love of neologisms, and with his tendency to make up new and fanciful names by running old ones together, it seemed to me rash totally to reject the possibility that ‘Belacane’ might be a kind of composite of ‘Bilquis’ and ‘Makeda’ – and doubly rash since the poet described her as a ‘dusky queen’.5

  When I looked more closely at the love affair between Belacane and Gahmuret, recounted at length in the first chapter of Parzival, I found further echoes of the King Solomon and Queen of Sheba story told in the Kebra Nagast and also, with minor variations, in a range of other Ethiopian legends. In this connection I felt it was not accidental that Wolfram had gone to considerable lengths to make it clear that Gahmuret – like Solomon – was white, while Belacane, like Makeda, was black.

  For example, after the arrival of the ‘fair complexioned’ Angevin knight6 in Zazamanc, Belacane observed to her hand-maidens: ‘His skin is a different colour from ours. I only hope this is no sore point with him?’7 Certainly it was not, because her romance with Gahmuret blossomed in the following weeks, one thing led to another, and eventually the couple retired to her bedroom in the palace: