Jean Markale is a highly respected poet, author and historian whose life focus has been on the Celtic tradition. When I came to his work on the Grail I expected something special. I was not disappointed.

The first thing I noticed is the interpretation Markale gave to the whole subject – he avoided the “nuts and bolts” approach of where is the Grail and focused on the nature of the Grail’s literary heritage and its metaphysical meaning. This is an important difference between Markale’s work and many others on the market.

In the era of materialism and scientism most books on the Grail seem infected with a literalism that mars their research. The approach seems to be to look “in the cupboard” or “under the sink” for the Grail, but never consider its symbolic meaning, except of course to buttress the latest location of its uncovering.

If we attempt to enter the mindset of the earlier authors of classic myths and legends, whether they be the Mahabharata, Old Testament, Celtic folk tales or Gnostic texts, we find the emphasis is on transmitting meaning.

While the ancients used historical events as triggers to create a story, their historical value was minimal, for around these events were enfolded metaphysical motifs and symbolic images and so on. These texts were never written as history and their value as a record of fact was never considered.

If we returned to India and questioned the authors of the Bhagavad Gita, they would certainly have considered Arjuna and Krishna to be “real”, but they would have cared little for the dating of the text or where the great battle actually took place.

The literal approach of the modernist author has saturated much contemporary spiritual and esoteric literature. This is a dangerous trend when we are more concerned with the bones of Jesus rather than Christ as a living symbol, or more focused on the literal location of the Grail rather than its ability to represent our quest for fulfilment. We are in danger of rationalising away our very soul.

Markale focuses on the original literary sources and digs deep into the mythological history of the Grail legend. He finds that behind the Christian symbolism, while significant, is a wealth of pre-Christian and pagan legends. He finds that in the earliest tales the Grail is only one element of what has come to be known as the Grail Procession, and hence has been completely overemphasised.

He expands the view of the Grail story and looks at other very significant aspects of the mythology. He then examines the key elements in the various renditions of the story as it has moved throughout history.

He traces the various motifs of the Grail from their earliest literary presentation in the writing of Chretien de Troyes through the Franco-British and Cisterian versions, to its flowering in the highly stylised forms of Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

He offers a detailed decoding of the myth, its many motifs, forms, symbols and images, and shows how it developed from earlier myths and legends and more importantly discusses its meaning as a sacred quest.

Rather than overemphasising the Christian elements or worse launching yet another doomed archaeological exploration for the location of the cup that held Christ’s blood, he unveils the metaphysic of the Grail and shows how it works regardless of philosophical or religious forms.

This is an important work on the Grail mythology. Emphasising literary and symbolic studies, the author shows a very strong knowledge of early myth and legend and helps restore the Grail mythos to its original role as an icon of the process of initiation, rather than as a historical anomaly.

Here we have the Grail as a living representation of our personal quest for meaning and it is in this sense that it has the most meaning.

– Reviewed by Robert Burns in New Dawn No. 90