From Ritual to RomanceWeston, Jessie L. (Jessie Laidlay)
Religion
From Ritual to Romance
Weston, Jessie L. (Jessie Laidlay)
Grail -- Legends -- History and criticism; Romances -- History and criticism
The Grail story is not _du fond en comble_ the product of imagination,
literary or popular. At its root lies the record, more or less
distorted, of an ancient Ritual, having for its ultimate object the
initiation into the secret of the sources of Life, physical and
spiritual. This ritual, in its lower, exoteric, form, as affecting the
processes of Nature, and physical life, survives to-day, and can be
traced all over the world, in Folk ceremonies, which, however widely
separated the countries in which they are found, show a surprising
identity of detail and intention. In its esoteric ‘Mystery’ form it was
freely utilized for the imparting of high spiritual teaching concerning
the relation of Man to the Divine Source of his being, and the
possibility of a sensible union between Man, and God. The recognition
of the cosmic activities of the Logos appears to have been a
characteristic feature of this teaching, and when Christianity came
upon the scene it did not hesitate to utilize the already existing
medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of Vegetation,
regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian Faith. Thus,
to certain of the early Christians, Attis was but an earlier
manifestation of the Logos, Whom they held identical with Christ. The
evidence of the Naassene document places this beyond any shadow of
doubt, and is of inestimable value as establishing a link between
pre-Christian, and Christian, Mystery tradition.
This curious synthetic belief, united as it was with the highly popular
cult of Mithra, travelled with the foreign legionaries, adherents of
that cult, to the furthest bounds of the Roman Empire, and when the
struggle between Mithraism and Christianity ended in the definite
triumph of the latter, by virtue of that dual synthetic nature, the
higher ritual still survived, and was celebrated in sites removed from
the centres of population—in caves, and mountain fastnesses; in
islands, and on desolate sea-coasts.
The earliest version of the Grail story, represented by our Bleheris
form, relates the visit of a wandering knight to one of these hidden
temples; his successful passing of the test into the lower grade of
Life initiation, his failure to attain to the highest degree. It
matters little whether it were the record of an actual, or of a
possible, experience; the casting into romantic form of an event which
the story-teller knew to have happened, had, perchance, actually
witnessed; or the objective recital of what he knew _might_ have
occurred; the essential fact is that the _mise-en-scène_ of the story,
the nomenclature, the march of incident, the character of the tests,
correspond to what we know from independent sources of the details of
this Nature Ritual. The Grail Quest was actually possible then, it is
actually possible to-day, for the indication of two of our romances as
to the final location of the Grail is not imagination, but the record
of actual fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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