The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

When I returned from France at the end of April 1989 I set my research assistant to work on the problem of the scholarly paper that Peter Lasko had mentioned to me. I knew that it might have been written by someone named Adolf and I knew that the subject matter had to do with a possible Ethiopian influence on Wolfram von Eschenbach's story of the Holy Grail. I did not know where, or when, the paper had been published, or even in what language, but I advised my researcher to contact the universities to see if there were any specialists on medieval German literature who might be able to help. While waiting for an answer on this I went out and bought a number of different versions of the Grail 'romance'. These included Chr en de Troyes's Conte du Grad, left unfinished by the author in AD 1182,(22) Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, a much later epic dated to the mid-fifteenth century,(23) and last but not least Parzival, which Wolfram von Eschenbach was thought to have written between the years 1195 and 1210(24) dates that coincided almost exactly with the main phase of construction work on the north porch of Chartres cathedral. I began to read these books and initially found Malory's the most accessible since it had been the inspiration for a number of stories and films dealing with the quest for the Holy Grail that I had enjoyed as a child. I quickly discovered, however, that Malory had presented an idealized, sanitized and above all Christianized account of 'the only true quest'. Wolfram's story, by contrast, was more earthy, provided a more accurate portrayal of the realities of human behaviour, and most important of all was completely devoid of New Testament symbolism where the Grail itself was concerned. In Malory the sacred relic was described as a 'vessel of gold' carried by a 'perfect clean maiden' and containing 'part of the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ'.(25) This, as I was well aware, was precisely the image that had long been enshrined in popular culture, where the Grail was always portrayed as a cup or a bowl (usually that in which Joseph of Arimathea caught a few drops of Christ's blood when the Saviour hung suffering on the cross). I myself had been so influenced by this conception that I found it difficult to think of the Grail as anything other than a cup. When I turned to Wolfram's Parzival, however, I found confirmation of what I had learned in France, namely that the relic although carried by a maiden just as in Malory was depicted as a stone:

However ill a mortal man may be, from the day on which he sees the Stone he cannot die for that week, nor does he lose his colour. For if anyone, maid or man, were to look at the Gral for two hundred years, you would have to admit that his colour was as fresh as in his early prime . . . Such powers does the Stone confer on mortal men that their flesh and bones are soon made young again. This Stone is called 'The Gral'.(26)

I was struck by this odd and compelling imagery, and it raised a nagging question in my mind: why should the Morte D'Arthur have depicted the Grail as 'a vessel' when the far earlier Parzival had unambiguously described it as 'a Stone'? What was going on here? I investigated further and learnt from one authority on quest literature that Malory was 'merely embroidering a theme, the meaning of which [he] did not understand' when he wrote the Morte D'Arthur.(27) That theme had been most definitively spelled out in Wolfram's Parzival and in Chr en de Troyes's Conte du Graal,(28) both of which were more than two hundred years older than the Morte. Encouraged by this advice I turned to my copy of Chr en's unfinished story and there read the following description of the Grail the first in literature (and, for that matter, in history). As in both Wolfram and Malory, the precious object was carried by a damsel:

Once she had entered with this grail that she held, so great a radiance appeared that the candles lost their brilliance just as the stars do at the rising of the sun and the moon . . . The grail . . . was of pure refined gold [and] was set with many kinds of precious stones, the richest and most costly in sea or earth.(29)

At no point, I discovered, did Chr en's manuscript explicitly state that the Grail was a cup or bowl. It was clear from the context, however, that this was precisely what he saw it as. In several places he referred to a central character 'the Fisher King' being 'served from the grail',(30) and later added: 'he's served with a single consecrated wafer brought to him in that grail that supports his life in full vigour, so holy a thing is the grail'.(31) On checking further I learned that the very word 'grail' was itself derived from the Old French gradate (Latin gradalis) meaning 'a wide and somewhat hollowed-out vessel in which delicious food is served'. In the colloquial parlance of Chr en's day gradale was often pronounced greal. And even in more recent times grazal, grazau, and grial continued to be used in parts of the south of France to denote receptacles of various kinds.(32) Here, therefore, was the origin of Malory's conception of the sacred object as a vessel. Other than the mention of 'a consecrated wafer', however, Chr en's treatment offered no unequivocal connections with Christianity (not even in the notion of the Grail being a 'holy thing' which could as easily have been inspired by the Old Testament as by the New(33). Like Wolfram, the French poet did not mention Christ's blood at all and certainly did not suggest that the relic was a container for it. It followed that the 'sacred blood' imagery associated with the Grail in popular culture was a gloss added by later authors a gloss that broadened, but also to some extent obscured, the original theme. With a little more work on the subject I was able to satisfy myself that this process of 'Christianization' had been sponsored by the Cistercian monastic order.(34) And the Cistercians in their turn had been profoundly influenced and shaped by one man Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who had joined the Order in the year 1112 and who was regarded by many scholars as the most significant religious figure of his era.(35) This same Saint Bernard, I then discovered, had also played a formative role in the evolution and dissemination of the Gothic architectural formula in its early days (he had been at the height of his powers in 1134 when the soaring north tower of Chartres cathedral had been built, and he had constantly stressed the principles of sacred geometry that had been put into practice in that tower and throughout the whole wonderful building).(36) Moreover, long after his death in 1153, his sermons and ideas had continued to serve as prime sources of inspiration for the further evolution of Gothic architecture and also for statuary and sculptures like those I had seen in the north porch at Chartres.(37) The principal bridge between the earlier non-Christian versions of the story of the Holy Grail and the stylized New Testament tract that it had become, by Malory's time had been formed by the so-called Queste del Saint Graal compiled by Cistercian monks in the thirteenth century.(38) Moreover, although he was already dead when this great anthology was begun, it seemed to me that the strong hand of Saint Bernard could also be seen at work here reaching out from beyond the grave as it were. I arrived at this conclusion because, in his extensive writings, this immensely influential cleric had propounded a mystical view of Christ's blood, a view that was incorporated by the compilers of the Queste into their new concept of the Grail itself.(39) From now on Wolfram's Stone was completely forgotten and Chr en's 'vessel', although preserved, was filled up with the blood of Christ. What I found interesting about this notion was the way in which it had immediately begun to be interpreted by the church. In hymns, sermons and epistles, I learned, subsequent generations of Christians all over Europe had gone to great lengths to equate the Grail symbolically with the Blessed Virgin Mary to whom, I remembered, Chartres cathedral had been dedicated. The reasoning underlying this pious allegory was as follows: the Grail (according to the Queste and other later recensions of the legend) contained the holy blood of Christ; before she gave birth to him, Mary had contained Christ himself within her womb; therefore, QED, the Grail was and always had been a symbol for Mary.(40) According to this logic, Mary Theotokos, the 'God Bearer', was the sacred vessel who had contained the Spirit made flesh. Thus, in the sixteenth-century Litany of Loretto(41) she was the vas spirituale (spiritual vessel), the vas honorabile (vessel of honour), and the vas insigne devotionis (singular vessel of devotion).(42) Why did this symbolism attract my attention? Quite simply because the Litany of Loretto had also referred to the Blessed Virgin as arca foederis(43) which, as I already knew, was Latin for 'the Ark of the Covenant'. I researched this coincidence further and discovered that the Litany was not the only place in which it cropped up. In the twelfth century, the redoubtable Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had also explicitly compared Mary to the Ark of the Covenant indeed he had done so in a number of his writings.(44) And as early as the fourth century Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, had preached a sermon in which he had argued that the Ark had been a prophetic allegory for Mary: just as it had contained the Old Law in the form of the Ten Commandments, so she had contained the New Law in the form of the body of Christ.(45) I was subsequently to discover that concepts like these had persisted into the twentieth century and had been woven into the fabric of modern Christian worship. On a trip to Israel, for example, I came across a small and beautiful Dominican church built in 1924 and dedicated A la Vi e Marie Arche d'Alliance in other words 'To the Virgin Mary Ark of the Covenant'. The church stood at Kiriath-Jearim, overlooking the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and its seven-metre steeple was topped off with a full-sized representation of the Ark. There were also several paintings of the sacred relic arranged around the interior walls of the building itself. During my visit I was given the following (very 'Ambrosian) explanation of the dedication and of the symbolism by a senior church official, Sister Raphael Mikhail:

'We compare Mary to a living Ark. Mary was the mother of Jesus, who was the master of the Law and of the Covenant. The tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments of the Law were placed inside the Ark by Moses; so also God placed Jesus in the womb of Mary. So she is the living Ark.'

It seemed to me highly significant that both the Ark and the Grail, apparently so different, should nevertheless have been compared repeatedly to the same biblical personality, and in exactly the same way. If Mary was both a 'living Ark' and a 'living Grail', I speculated, then surely this suggested that the two sacred objects might not in fact have been so very different that they might, indeed, have been one and the same thing. This struck me as a truly electrifying possibility. And, farfetched though it at first appeared, it did shed interesting light on the choice and juxtaposition of statuary in the north porch of Chartres cathedral. If I was correct then Melchizedek's 'Grail' cup with the 'Stone' inside it would at one level have represented Mary but could, at another, have been intended to serve as an esoteric symbol for the Ark of the Covenant and for the stone tablets that it had contained. Such an interpretation, I felt, added considerable weight to the hypothesis that the other iconography of the north porch signalled the removal of the sacred relic to Ethiopia. But I also realized that I had no really firm grounds on which to base a conclusion of this magnitude only coincidence, guesswork and a strong intuition that I might be on to something important. I have always been inclined to follow my intuitions to see where they lead. However, it seemed to me that if I was going to involve myself in a proper, thorough, expensive and time-consuming investigation then I needed something rather more solid to go on than a few happy accidents and presentiments. I did not have to wait long. In June 1989 my researcher finally managed to locate the academic paper that, according to Peter Lasko, had suggested a possible Ethiopian influence on the portrayal of the Holy Grail in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. The encouragement given to me by that paper launched me on the quest that was to dominate my life for the next two years.

LITERARY INFLUENCE OR SOMETHING MORE?

The paper, entitled 'New Light on Oriental Sources for Wolfram's Parzival', had appeared in 1947 in the academic journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America).(46) The author was Helen Adolf, a highly regarded medievalist who had taken a special interest in the literary pedigree of the Holy Grail. The thesis that she put forward (for which she admitted that she was indebted to two earlier authorities)(47) was that Wolfram although largely influenced by Chr en de Troyes must also 'have known, besides Chr en, a Grail story in Oriental setting'.(48) When I began to read Helen Adolf's paper I was already aware, from the background research that I had done, that Chr en de Troyes had effectively 'invented' the Grail in 1182. Prior to that date it had existed neither in history, nor in myth. Most authorities on the subject agreed that there were earlier legends dealing, for example, with magic cauldrons, heroic quests, and deeds of chivalry done by King Arthur and his Knights which the courtly poets and raconteurs had drawn upon to add texture to their Grail stories.(49) These older lays, however, which had been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, had been too well known, too 'tried and tested', in short too familiar to all and sundry, to have provided the creative impulse for the distinct cycle of romances that Chr en initiated in the late twelfth century. The great French poet had never finished his famous Conte du Graal. Within a very few years, however, Wolfram von Eschenbach capitalized on the good start that had been made, extending and completing his predecessor's story while at the same time rather churlishly accusing Chr en of 'doing wrong' by it and adding that his own German text was the 'authentic tale'.(50) What made such protestations seem odd was the fact that Wolfram had obviously lifted many details directly from the Conte du Graal and, by and large, had remained faithful to its plot and characters.(51) Indeed there was only one glaringly obvious difference the bizarre innovation of making the Grail a Stone. The motive for this innovation did, therefore, look like a genuine mystery to some scholars. It could not have been a simple mistake on Wolfram's part he was much too clever and precise a raconteur to have made an error of such significance. The only reasonable conclusion, therefore, was that he had described the relic in the way he did for some special reason of his own. It was to precisely this question that Helen Adolf addressed herself in her short paper. And she offered an answer to it that I found most intriguing. Somehow or other, she argued, Wolfram must have gained access to the Kebra Nagast, enjoyed the story about the Ark of the Covenant being removed from Jerusalem to Axum, and decided to work elements of it into his own Parzival. The influence was only 'indirect', she thought; nevertheless the most likely explanation for the curious character of Wolfram's Grail could be traced to the use, 'in every Abyssinian church', of what she described as 'a so-called Tabot, a slab of wood or stone'.(52) Adolf explained that this practice had its origins in the religious traditions set down in the Kebra Nagast an observation that I knew to be correct. In 1983 I had learned that Tabot was the local name for the sacred relic believed to be the Ark of the Covenant that Menelik had supposedly brought from Jerusalem and that was now kept in the sanctuary chapel at Axum. Moreover, as the reader will recall, I had subsequently discovered, as Adolf also affirmed, that each and every Ethiopian Orthodox church possessed its own tabot. These objects, which were often spoken of as replicas of the original in Axum, were not boxes or chests but took the form of flat slabs. The ones I had seen had all been made of wood. Researching the matter further, however, I discovered that many were indeed made of stone.(53) On the basis of several comparisons Adolf asserted that Wolfram, too, had known this and had derived his Grail-Stone from the Ethiopian tabot. She also pointed out that not all the characters in Parzival had been borrowed from Chr en de Troyes; there were a few additional figures whose origins were mysterious and who might well have been inspired by the Kebra Nagast. She could offer no solid explanation as to how the German raconteur could have become familiar with the Kebra Nagast but suggested rather tentatively that wandering Jews might have brought it to Europe. In the medieval period, she pointed out, 'the Jews were not only the mediators between Arabs and Christians in general. They had a special stake in Ethiopia, where they formed, and still form, an important part of the population.'(54) I found Adolf's arguments persuasive but extremely limited in scope. She had confined herself to the specialized field of literary criticism, and accordingly her concerns had been of an entirely literary nature. Having set out to prove the possibility of a connection between the Kebra Nagast and Parzival (with the former 'indirectly influencing' the latter) she had been quite happy to stop when she felt she had achieved this goal. I was enormously grateful to her, however, because she had opened my eyes to something far more exciting something of infinitely greater significance. On the basis of the comparisons cited earlier between the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and Mary the Mother of Christ, I had already begun to wonder whether the identities of the Ark and the Grail were really as distinct and separate as they seemed at first sight. Now it occurred to me that if Wolfram's Grail looked as if it had been influenced by Ethiopian traditions concerning the Ark then there was just a chance that there could be more to this perhaps much more than Helen Adolf had ever guessed. To cut a long story short, I began to wonder whether the German poet might not have deliberately constructed his fictional Grail as a kind of 'code' for the real and historical Ark. If so then the quest that formed the central theme of Parzival could also be a code that might, like some cryptic treasure map, point the way to the last resting place of the Ark itself. I had already become intrigued by the possibility that a similar code in the north porch of Chartres cathedral though carved in stone rather than written in a book might hint that the relic had been taken to Ethiopia. It was therefore with real enthusiasm and excitement that I set out to try to 'decode' Parzival.

CELESTIAL WRITING, LAWS AND ORACLES

It seemed to me that my initial task should be to determine whether Wolfram's Grail could indeed have been designed as a sort of cryptogram for the Ark of the Covenant. To this end I decided that I would temporarily postpone further examination of the Ethiopian connection suggested by Adolf. Instead I would look for direct parallels between the characteristics of the Grail and the characteristics of the Ark as described in the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish sources. Only if those parallels proved persuasive would there be any point in going further. The first thing that attracted my attention was the way in which Wolfram had transformed Chr en'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." 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)