Part VI
In this part . . .
It can’t be a Dummies book without these fun chapters of ten tantalizing topics. Chapter 15 points you toward ten possible candidates for the location of the Holy Grail. Check the expiration date on your passport before venturing into Chapter 16, because we plan your itinerary with ten must-see Templar sites. And break out your whip and fedora and channel your inner Indiana Jones — Chapter 17 gives you ten starting points to start hunting the famous long-lost Templar treasures such as the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Spear of Destiny, or even secret parchments that might change the world. Holy cow.
Chapter 15
In This Chapter
● Seeking the hiding places of the Grail
● Examining grails that survive today
● Discovering surviving grail castles
The earliest reference to a claim as being the actual cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper came from a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon pilgrim to Jerusalem named Arculf, who wrote that he saw a two-handled silver chalice in a Jerusalem chapel between Golgotha and the Martyrium. It disappeared long before the Crusaders got there.
The period of the Crusades was a bull market for the trade in sacred relics coming out of the Holy Land. During the Middle Ages, there were no less than 20 candidates for the Holy Grail floating around Europe and the Middle East in various locations.
We discount Dan Brown’s contention that Mary Magdalene is the real Holy Grail, the sacred vessel that contained Jesus’s offspring, and that her bones are buried under I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. In this chapter, we list ten possible locations where the Holy Grail may have been over the years, or may still be today.
For more on the origin of the Holy Grail legends, turn to Chapter 10.
Glastonbury Tor, England
Sticking up out of the English countryside like a big geological lump stands Glastonbury Tor, a high, oblong hill that can be seen for miles. At one time, it was an island, but the sea has receded, leaving this strange geographical sight. It has been identified over the centuries as the mythical Isle of Avalon of King Arthur’s time. What makes Glastonbury such a startling sight today is the ruined entryway of the abbey’s tower that sits at the top of the knoll.
The source of the belief that that Glastonbury could be the location of the Holy Grail is in the legend of Joseph of Arimathea. Christians in Britain have long told the legend that Joseph came to the island shortly after Christ’s ascension, and that he and his fellow travelers founded the monastery at Glastonbury. The tale goes that he was accompanied by the Bethany sisters (Mary and Martha), Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, and others followers. A variation of the tale is that Joseph even brought the teenaged Jesus to Britain before Jesus began his ministry! Of course, much of this legend may have had more to do with claiming that Christianity was alive in Britain long before the Roman Catholic Church was established, as part of the British feud between Catholics and Protestants, than it did with history.
In A.D. 1190, after a fire that consumed the abbey, two massive oak coffins were discovered buried below the ruins, with the inscription Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia (Here lies King Arthur in the island of Avalon). Since that time, many have believed that the remains really were King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere.
As you may expect, there is a Holy Grail associated with Glastonbury. Known as the Nanteos Cup, it is a bowl said to have been made of olive wood. For many years, it was in the care of the Nanteos family, but it’s now in a museum in the Welsh village of Aberystwyth. True believers have drunk healing water from the cup over the centuries, some going so far as to nibble bits of wood from its edge. As a result, little is left of it today.
The Welsh Commissioner of Monuments has said that the artifact is, in actuality, made of Witch Elm wood, and is actually a bowl from the 1400s. Others believe it to be the genuine grail brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea.
Hawkstone Park (Shropshire, England)
When the term Holy Grail gets mentioned, most take it to mean the cup or chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper before his arrest. But others have a different view. Some have said that the Grail is a jar used by Joseph of Arimathea or Mary Magdalene to collect blood, sweat, or tears from Christ as he hung on the cross. And it is from this notion that a tiny alabaster or onyx jar in England enters the picture.
In Hodnet Church in Shropshire, England, there is a stained-glass window that depicts, among other saints, St. John the Evangelist. Unlike the others in the panel who are older, with beards (Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke), this is a young, almost feminine John, shown holding a chalice. Some have suggested that this person is, in fact, Mary Magdalene, and not St. John.
As we discuss in Chapter 13, Mary Magdalene is often misconstrued as the “woman with the alabaster jar,” who anointed Christ with oil before his arrest. Curiously, in 1920, a small alabaster cup, the size of a shot glass or an eggcup, was found in a hidden recess of a statue’s base, deep within a grotto in Hawkstone Park, Shropshire. Author Graham Phillips is a believer that this cup is, in fact, the Holy Grail.
Hawkstone has long been in the running as a possible location for the final resting place of King Arthur, and it’s through him that the legend of the little cup first came to be associated with the Grail legend.
The statue was commissioned in the 1850s by Thomas Wright, who had long claimed that he possessed the Holy Grail. The statue was part of a set of four in the grotto — of a lion, an angel, a bull, and an eagle. These were early Christian symbols of the four gospels, and they do, in fact, appear over the heads of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the stained-glass window in Hodnet Church. The eagle appears over the head of John, and it was the eagle statue that contained the cup.
Through a complex story, Phillips suggests that the image in the stained-glass window is Mary Magdalene, not John, and that the little alabaster cup that is attributed to the “woman with the alabaster jar” was hidden in the eagle statue, with the window as a clue. Others must have believed it, too — in 2006, vandals were caught trying to remove the John/Mary panel from the church with a crowbar.
Takt-i-Taqdis, Iran
The Holy Mountain of Shiz in Iran has long been believed to be the origin of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism, in what was once the eastern part of Persia. There, a curious ruin still exists today of a temple erected in A.D. 660, the Temple for the Throne of Arches. The Temple itself only lasted 30 short years before being destroyed and looted by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. And yet, it has been rumored to be the resting place of the Holy Grail.
The tale goes that the builders of the Temple captured Jerusalem in A.D. 614 and discovered the True Cross (of Jesus’s crucifixion) and the Holy Grail.
The relics were promptly hauled off to the Throne of Arches, where they remained until the invasion by the Byzantine forces. Contemporary accounts speak of the cross being taken back to Byzantium, but not the Holy Grail — which means it could still be there.
The temple itself was lost for centuries. In the 1200s, a German poet named Albrecht von Sharfenberg found it after reading about it in a manuscript he had translated. He simply went right where the legend said it was and found it. Until its second rediscovery in 1937, it was still believed to have been a mythical place. Its location and setting closely match a medieval description of the location of the grail castle setting in paradise, surrounded by a lake, a meadow, a stream, and a mountain.
The Santo Caliz (Valencia, Spain)
In the Our Lady of the Forsaken Basilica in Valencia, Spain, there is a chalice that has long been thought to be the Holy Grail. The chalice as it exists today is a simple, brown, stone cup, set into a larger, more ornate, gold base.
Researchers believe the stone cup really is a Middle Eastern artifact that dates back to the first century, while the gold base was added during medieval times. It is inset with pearls, gemstones, and alabaster. A curious part of the more modern base is that it is partially composed of an inverted bowl that also dates to the first century.
The legend of the Santo Caliz is that it was taken to Rome after Jesus’s resurrection by St. Peter, for safekeeping. It was believed to have been given to St. Laurence in A.D. 258 by Pope Sixtus II to Valencia by Emperor Valerian in the third century. Both Laurence and Sixtus became martyrs, murdered by the Romans for practicing Christianity and for refusing to turn over the chalice to them. Documents exist verifying its Spanish history since the 11th century.
The chalice was endangered during the period of Moorish occupation of Spain in the eighth century, and again during the 20th-century Spanish Civil War. That it has survived with a provable pedigree so many centuries is miraculous in and of itself. In 1982, Pope John Paul II became the first pope since Sixtus II to celebrate a mass with the chalice, and Pope Benedict XVI used it at a mass in July 2006.
Sacro Catino (Genoa, Italy)
The Sacro Catino (Holy Basin) in Genoa, Italy, is another longtime contender for being the Holy Grail. According to the medieval author William of Tyre, it was discovered in a mosque in Caesarea in 1101. Long thought to have been a bowl cut from a giant emerald, it’s actually made of green Egyptian glass (discovered by accident when it was broken by Napoleon’s butterfingered henchmen in the early 1800s). This came as a rude surprise to the Genoese, who had accepted it as payment for a large debt, thinking it was really made of emerald.
Over the years, some embroidery has been added to the tale of this particular cup. Not only is it claimed to have been used by Jesus at the last supper. It is also purported to have been given to King Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, some 3,000 years ago.
Rosslyn Chapel (Roslin, Scotland)
Somehow, Rosslyn Chapel (www.rosslynchapel.org.uk) in Scotland manages to make every list when it comes to the Templars, the Freemasons, or the Holy Grail. We talk about the many legends associated with Rosslyn all throughout this book, but here’s its Grail connection:
The legend goes that the Templars fled France when their arrests were imminent, and fled to Scotland, hauling the Temple treasure from their Paris vaults. The treasure may have included the Holy Grail and other sacred relics. When the Saint-Clair family built Rosslyn Chapel in the mid-1400s, it was constructed with hidden crypts and other hiding places to tuck the treasure into. Some researchers believe that the Grail is hidden within the presumably hollow Apprentice Pillar in the church.
Wewelsburg Castle (Buren, Germany)
In the western part of Germany, known as Westphalia, is a town whose skyline is dominated by a massive Renaissance-era castle. And during the period of Nazism between the 1930s and 1940s, it was a very curious place indeed.
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfdrer of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (better known as the SS, Adolf Hitler’s feared internal secret police and engineers of the Holocaust), came to Buren in 1934 and took over the imposing castle. On the surface, the plan was to make Wewelsburg Castle a school for new SS officers. But Himmler had other plans for it as well. He had visions of the SS as an elite Knightly Order, like the Templars and the Teutonic Knights, and Wewelsburg Castle would become the place of initiation of this new order. It would become the new spiritual center of the Nazi paganism that was based on Germanic legends.
The Reichsfdrer’s plans were grandiose, and he eventually wanted to take over the entire village, making it a community inhabited only by members of the SS and their families. But such plans were never realized. Refurbishing the castle was a large enough task to accomplish. In 1939, a small concentration camp was established in the nearby Niederhagen forest to provide prison labor for the project. Of the 3,900 prisoners brought to the village, more than 1,200 died — literally worked or starved to death as they labored on Himmler’s building project.
In the imposing North Tower, a round chamber known as the Obergruppenfhhrersaal was constructed, with a sunken area in the floor and a round, oak table. Wewelsburg was Himmler’s private Camelot, and this was the chamber for his round table. There were just 12 seats around it, for the top dozen officers of the SS. In the domed ceiling there remains today a stylized swastika set in stone, modified with the symbol of the SS at each corner. Meanwhile, the round chamber immediately below this room was a crypt with a well set into the floor. This was to be where the ashes of all dead SS members were to be interred, adorned with an eternal flame.
The Holy Grail enters into this lurid tale via two paths. The first is through the work of a dedicated Grail seeker named Otto Rahn. Rahn was inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem Parzival, in which it is said that the Grail was kept in the “marvelous castle at Montsalvat in the Pyrenees.”
Rahn’s research led him to Montsegur in France, a former stronghold of Cathars near Rennes-le-Chateau. There he explored caves, grottos, and castles in search of the Grail. Rahn was seduced into joining the SS by Himmler, who wanted his expertise in Cathar and Grail studies.
The second legend was that Himmler himself secretly visited the Spanish abbey of Montserrat near Barcelona in 1940. He, too, was inspired by Parzival, but he believed the Montsalvat in the opera was Spain’s Montserrat, where a supposed grail castle stood during the Middle Ages. It is said that Himmler went there in search of the Grail, but came back empty-handed. That’s not a big surprise — the monks at the abbey were well aware of Himmler’s (and Nazi Germany’s) anti-Catholic positions and sent him packing.
The curious aspect of associations between the Nazis and Christian relics like the Spear of Destiny (that stabbed Christ’s body as he hung on the cross) and the Holy Grail is that these were sacred items that belonged to a Jew, which would seem to be contradictory with Nazi doctrine. But the Nazis went to great lengths to engineer an elaborate explanation that Jesus was descended from Jacob, who, they said, was not Jewish at all, but an Aryan. The Ahnenerbe Forschungs-und Lehrgemeinschaft (Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society) was created to use the methods of science to bend history and archaeology enough to suit the Nazis’ racial and cultural policies. Ahnenerbe’s headquarters were based in Wewelsburg Castle. One of Himmler’s goals was to find the Holy Grail, and he put Ahnenerbe to work on it. There was even a special room in Wewelsburg set aside for the Grail when it was found.
As for Otto Rahn, rumors abounded for decades that he discovered a crystal believed to be the Grail, and that it was, in fact, placed in the special room at Wewelsburg. This is likely a myth, given that Rahn once wrote that he believed that the Grail had perished with the end of the Templars in 1307.
The truth of what Rahn may have found in the south of France may never be known, but it was rumored that a large quartz crystal stone was placed in the castle that was reputed to be the Grail — interesting because the Grail described in the Parzival poem is not a cup, but a stone.
After an altercation with Himmler, Rahn was consigned briefly as a guard at Dachau Concentration Camp. In 1939, he requested dismissal from the SS, but shortly after his request was made, he died while mountain climbing. Whether he fell, was murdered, or committed suicide, no one can say.
Rahn is curious for other reasons. His works were not translated from German until recently, but his influence on research into the Cathar and Templar regions in the Languedoc are everywhere in the speculative books written since the 1970s. In addition, Rahn has long been believed to have been an inspiration for the fictional character of Indiana Jones.
Montsegur, France
The heart of the Languedoc in France was once Cathar territory, until their destruction at the hands of the Catholic Church in the Albigensian Crusade. One of their last strongholds was the village of Montsegur, in the Pyrenees Mountains. In 1243, approximately 10,000 Catholic troops surrounded and laid siege to the village. The Cathars held out until May of 1244. When they finally surrendered, more than 200 of them were burned as heretics for refusing to renounce there faith.
The legend goes that two dozen Cathars escaped before the fall of their fortress and smuggled out a treasure of some kind. Some have speculated that part of it may have been the Holy Grail.
As we mention in the preceding section, the German researcher Otto Rahn believed that Montsegur was the legendary grail castle referred to as Monsalvat in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s tale of Parzival, because both words mean “safe mountain.” In addition there are other connections between Montsegur and the Parsifal legend: Raymond de Pereille, commander and builder of Montsegur’s Cathar fortress in 1210, had similarities to Parsifal. And a later telling of the Grail tale, Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s Jungerer Titurel (1272), identified the first Grail King as Perilla. That was close enough for Rahn to start looking in Montsegur.
If Rahn did, indeed, find the Grail in Montsegur while he was working for the Nazis, he never said so and neither did they. The fortress walls that stand around the village today are not those built by Raymond de Pereille and the Cathars, no matter what the tour books and local guides may tell you. Their fortifications were torn down and completely reduced to rubble after the Cathars surrendered in 1244. The walls there today were built by royal French troops in the 1600s.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
In 1910, Syrian workers digging a well near the ancient city of Antioch discovered a curious artifact: a silver cup or chalice that held a simpler, inner cup. The exterior depicted images of Christ and ten others, along with vines, scrolls, a rabbit, a lamb, and an eagle. The belief for many years was that the inner cup was the cup of the Last Supper, and the exterior was a later, more ornate and ceremonial addition. This artifact became known as the Antioch Chalice and is believed by some to be the Holy Grail. But what was it doing in Antioch?
The legend goes that the Grail had indeed been found in England, centuries after Joseph of Arimathea brought it from Jerusalem. Then, when the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land in the 1100s, the desire was to return it to its rightful place of honor in the Holy City of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the people delivering it to Jerusalem were attacked outside of Antioch by Muslim forces and knew they faced certain defeat — so they buried the Grail so the infidels couldn’t possess it.
Today, the cup is in the Cloisters section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Experts have dated the exterior silver chalice to be from the fourth to sixth century A.D., and they do not believe the inner cup is from the time of Christ. But who is to really say? Have a look for yourself at www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/06/waa/hod_50.4.htm.
Castle Stalker (Argyll, Scotland)
A tall narrow castle, built on an impossibly tiny island scarcely larger than the castle itself, Castle Stalker (www.castlestalker.com) is isolated — and the perfect location for the Grail. Built in 1320 by the MacDougall clan, the Lords of Lorn, it passed to the Stuarts in 1388. The long history of the castle is filled with murder, intrigue, sieges, and the occasional loss in a drunken bet.
The ruined castle became a labor of love for Lt. Col. D. R. Stewart Allward and his family beginning in 1965. They spent decades restoring it to its present condition. Allward died in 1991, but the family continues to own and operate the castle as a tourist site. Owing to its lonely, forbidding location near Port Appin, it can only be reached by a rowboat at high tide, and a wet, sloppy walk at low tide.
What makes this a candidate for the Holy Grail? Come on, everybody knows it’s there. At one point, occupying French forces in the castle even admitted to King Arthur they had it: “We’ve already got one, you see?”
Besides, it’s the castle at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the “Castle Aaaaaagggh.”