John Michael Greer - The Ceremony of the Grail

Introduction

I began writing this book several months after the publication of The Secret of the Temple: Earth Energies, Sacred Geometry, and the Lost Keys of Freemasonry . Its genesis, however, began well before the prolonged course of research and reflection that led to that earlier book. I first read of the Holy Grail in retellings of the Arthurian legend meant for children, which abounded in public libraries when I was young. Already in those earliest encounters I wondered about the motif of the Waste Land, the region of ecological devastation that surrounded the Grail Castle in the legends, which could only be healed if a wandering knight reached the castle, saw the Grail, and asked the right question.

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the state of the environment was a constant theme of news stories and popular media alike, that imagery seemed relevant. As I grew up and began to revisit the old legends with eyes increasingly attuned to the lessons of ecology and history, I began to wonder whether the Waste Land of legend had been an actual place, the devastation it suffered a real eventor series of eventslocated somewhere in the history or prehistory of our species. By the late 1980s those questions led me to the writings of Jessie Weston, whose groundbreaking studies of the origins of the Grail legend gave me crucial clues. By that time, however, my own research had taken me in a different direction, toward glimpses of a forgotten archaic technology embodied in ancient temples and medieval churches that boosted agricultural productivity using natural energies.

That research eventually led to the writing of The Secret of the Temple . While I worked on that book, however, it became clear to me that the old legends of the Waste Land and the Holy Grail had profound connections to the temple technology, on the one hand, and to a broader and equally fascinating range of archaic beliefs and practices on the other. I included some of what I found in that earlier book, but there turned out to be much moreand Jessie Weston, once again, proved to be the most useful guide into the ancient secrets and tangled historical events that surrounded the Grail legend.

At the heart of Westons own understanding of the Grail was the recognition that the accounts of that mysterious object in the earliest medieval romances on the subject were more or less garbled descriptions of a ceremony of initiation. That ceremony, she argued, had parallels all over the world, but its specific form traced its descent from the rituals of the ancient Greek Mysteries, which spread across the Roman world in the heyday of the Empire and survived in isolated corners of western Europe long after Rome fell. In her earlier writings on the subject, she traced the ceremony of the Grail to the mountains of Wales where, she believed, it had lingered into the Middle Ages before going extinct. In her last book on the subject, From Ritual to Romance , her views had shifted dramatically: she traced the hiding place of the Grail ceremony to the isolated region where England and Scotland border each other, and she stated that the ceremony had not gone extinct at all, but was still being practiced in her time.