https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7sJBEEuEG_s
So hello everybody, we are back with Richard Roland for one more episode of our universal history. We’ve been talking about a lot of stuff in the past several months, some things that many people have never heard about strange legends going to the ends of the earth with our series on Ethiopia. But now a lot of people will be excited because we’re finally coming to talk about the grail. And many people have been waiting for us to talk about the grail. Just because it’s such a prominent figure in in Western legends and there’s so much around it even up to today in popular culture. So I’m really happy to have Richard to talk about this because I know he’s going to surprise me as well with some of his knowledge and so Richard thanks for coming along. So, I’m super excited to do this. The grail is really important to me and I think it’s, it’s one of these great nexus points in the whole question of universal history so I think that I think that by the end of, you know, probably it’s going to take us maybe a couple of videos to get through some of this By the, by the time we get through that I think people will have a much better idea about, let’s say sort of the organic way that universal history kind of develops and then it’s actually kind of this ongoing process. Right. This is Jonathan Peugeot. I have a little personal thing going on which is that Richard is one of the, the first people to actually read a copy of God’s Dog as many people know in the at the end of October, probably when this is coming out the crowdfunding will have already started for our graphic novel and so I wanted Richard to say a few things about what he thought about our graphic novel. Well, first of all, you owe me an afternoon, because I had sat down I was actually at a coffee shop working, and I sat down I was like all right I got this list of things like I’m going to do some writing and some study and all this different stuff. And then as I’m in the middle of that, you message me and you’re like hey do you want to look at God’s Dog and I was like well I guess that’s the rest of my day. So, it’s really cool. There are just, I mean, just the opening pages there are so many things in them, which if people have been attentive long term viewers and listeners of your podcast. They’re going to pick up on probably instantly. But I think the thing that’s really impressive to me is the way that all of those symbolic elements like they’re not just like, oh here’s a neat symbolism thing let’s wedge this in right but they’re actually, they are they’re all wrapped together in this very cohesive way and this kind of medieval way of, of relating them relating them to each other in such a way that we can. We can sort of see how these concepts relate. I think there are probably very few people who are going to be really bothered by the by the, let’s say the freedom that you take with with chronology. I think there’s probably very few people because I think that kind of person probably isn’t going to read your, your graphic novel anyway. But, but I also think it’s, it’s maybe going to be a really great proof case for how a bunch of the things that we’re talking about in universal history in hagiography in, you know, all these Christian legends the lives of the saints and you’ve got St George is in there St Christopher is in there St Simeon the stylized is in there. People who obviously did not exist people’s obviously didn’t didn’t didn’t ever meet right. Yeah. And, but they’re all sort of in there together in and, of course St George’s is a really cool character. We’re big St George fans at my, at my house so there’s that one. That one sequence that I sent you a screenshot of and I was like this is really cool and I had to come and come home and show that to my son George who’s named after nice. Yeah, so, I don’t know it’s going to be really great. I think this, it’s going to do a lot of really important things. One of the things that it’s doing and I know this is probably one of your main goals is to return our, what should be, let’s say our native storytelling language. And you know that I am obviously a big Tolkien fan, I have a whole podcast. Right, there’s no doubt of your there’s no so my, my, my Tolkien bona fides should not be in question right. I think that’s part of the reason that Tolkien is so dominant when it comes to imaginative storytelling, especially in Christian spheres, to the point that it most of us if we’re going to sit down and write a work of like fantasy fiction or something, I mean Tom he says, you have to spend the first few years just writing the Tolkien out of your system. Right. But part of the reason that he’s become so dominant is precisely that his books came along at a time when Christians had lost their native storytelling language like we become so disconnected from it, that the only option that we really had was to make something like Middle Earth. So I think that, and I’m not saying that’s bad obviously again, I don’t think anyone’s going to question my love of Tolkien, but I do think that it’s really important that we regain our, this, regain this, this, what should be for Christians, it should be our native language, right. And the thing is like once you do that once you get really deep into something, then you go from having, you know, you enter into the glorious freedom of the sons of God right you go from having to be like, just really rigidly strict with, okay, this, this chronology and I’m going to write this, this incredibly, you know, like detailed historical novel and maybe I don’t believe these miracles and got to question all these things right. You go from that approach to instead being able to because because you inhabit these things as like a native speaker of the language, you can then play with it with the kind of freedom that a native speaker of English has right. And I think that a native speaker of English can do certain things with poetry that somebody who’s learning English as a second language can’t do or wouldn’t understand. And I think you’ve accomplished that in this graphic novel, and I want to encourage everyone to please go and back it. I’m going to be getting multiple copies for gifts and Christmas is coming up soon. So, I don’t know if they’ll fulfill before probably not. I didn’t, I didn’t promise promise this to be clear. But, but anyway, I’m going to be getting multiple copies as gifts and I would encourage other people to do so as well. We want this book to do well so that we can have lots more things like this. So, yeah, thanks, Richard. I appreciate it. Yeah, the goal of this first crowdfunding is to, to kind of generate enough excitement and honestly enough money so that we can now put these out regularly you know like every six months or whatever so we can get the whole whole story out because this is just the first chapter. It’s just the beginning. The story is already totally written. It’s very big. So we need a lot of room to tell it. There’s this great moment at the beginning of a graphic novel, if I can just share a little bit of it’s not really a spoiler but where there’s you know there’s these pilgrims are walking along and they’re singing this hymn and I read the hymn. I messaged you and I said, which Syrian him is that like, I couldn’t remember which one it was. But it was so obviously Syrian, you know that it, it seemed like it like it had to be and then you messaged back and oh it’s this one. But it was just, it was really cool. Yeah, so I’m jazzed about it. Cool. All right now on to the grail so on to the grail us off of the grail. So what I wanted to do for this first video on the grail is to talk about what we could say the seeds, or the sources are the ground out of which the grail legends which are primarily explored through a genre of literature called a romance not not like, you know, people falling in love married. I, hopefully the people who watch your show are like a student have to know what what that term means right. A romance basically just means like a high adventure story. Yeah, because we’ve been talking about the Alexander romance and so I’m sure they need to wasn’t a love story. Right, right, right. Yes. Now actually people, you know do actually fall in love and get married in these stories but they’re not just about that so. Okay. So I want to talk about three sources. And the first will be what I’ll call the Celtic reliquary tradition so those of you who are wanting like the symbolism of Ireland and things like that you’re not going to quite get that in this video but you are going to get some of it. The second thing I want to talk about is the, let’s call her the Iberian Virgin and her grail. And then finally, I want to end on Joseph, Joseph of Arimathea, who is of course very important to the great legends and the his links to the Byzantine mystical tradition and sort of how all that comes in. So I’m not going to actually talk about the romances themselves today. And I think the reason for that will be sort of more apparent when we get to the end. So, to begin with. In the Celtic tradition. The, the way that Celtic Christianity thought about and treated relics is a little bit different from what maybe you know other traditions have done so in the Celtic tradition, it’s the, there’s a great deal of veneration given to the relics of the saints, this is nothing unusual in the Celtic tradition. In fact, they usually don’t mean the bones of a saint. They usually seem to mean items that the relic that the saint has left behind them. liturgical books, Gospels, crozieres, bells, chalices, etc. And there. If you read Celtic hagiography and I’ve been reading quite a lot of it lately, which you’re going to find is that very unique honor and and reverence that are given to these to these items that’s different from what you find in the rest of Christianity. And there’s some scholars who think that these, this is like a, let’s say a sanctification of the idea of the of the tribal palladium you know like the the relics of or the idols of the tribe or whatever that are sort of passed down in Celtic culture, that may or may not be the case. If it is the case, it’s not a problem for us. Right. Yeah, but it’s also there in in Scripture in terms of the passing of the skins of Elijah to Elisha and then there’s also the Ark itself, which is this this kind of physical object which isn’t, which isn’t the body of the same but which they take gathers together a certain amount of authority or power with it. Right. Right. And that’s the thing to remember the FOD to this idea of this FOD right transmitted you know all this stuff. Yeah, that’s the thing to remember about the Ark is that it’s a, it’s a container, it held the, you know, the tables of the law and the, the, the manna and Aaron’s rod that butted and Goliath sword, weirdly enough. Right. So that’s our at least, at the very least they kept Goliath sword in the tabernacle. Right. When David shows up there to get some food, he needs food and a weapon. And they said, Well, the only food we have here is the showbread. And the only weapon we have here is Goliath sword so they had taken the sword of this Nephilim, and they had actually kept it in the Holy Place in the in the tabernacle so that’s, yeah, that’s another video for another day, but. Alright, so the blaming sword symbolism. I know, I know, I know. So, I’m sorry. So basically this this Gaelic tradition of the importance of objects, which are transmitted and which are can be connected to a thing. So, right. And so for instance you had things like the book of St. Which was supposed to be which was born, they carried it out in battle, which is not unusual for relics in the Middle Ages, but the belief was that if a person who was pure of heart, carried the book, then, then it would bring victory for the clan. Of course there are other relics that give oracles. One of the most important kinds of relics in the Celtic tradition is a bell, which is actually one of the forms that the grail takes we’ll talk about that later probably the bell and of course, what are bells used for in, in Western liturgy, they’re used at the moment of the sacred right at the moment of, of the consecration of the gifts, that’s, you know, about there’s a bell is called the sacred bell that is wrong. They still do this in like some traditional Western, Western liturgies. So bells are very important. And the idea was, you know, and the miracles that are attributed to the to these relics you know they’re, they’re oracles. There’s, you know, bells that refuse to ring in the hand, except of the person for, you know, to whom it belongs you know like the saint, you know, so how do you know like is the saint, legit or not right is he really the one who’s supposed to be our bishop well the bell rings for him and not for anyone else. So there’s, you know, there’s another bell that actually like sails through the air from Jerusalem to Wales, right as a gift from heaven to this particular bishop. Other items are really, really interesting. For instance, one of the one of the most common forms that we find in Welsh and Irish hagiography is the idea of a of an altar, right and we don’t typically think of an altar as being a relic because we think of an altar is being like, you know, it’s large it’s unwieldy and it’s more or less fixed to a certain place. But in the Celtic tradition there are all of these floating altars flying altars right and I think this is somehow connected to the, the the, the interconnectedness of like So the, the, the ancient Irish thought of, of, let’s say mist of course there’s a lot of mist in that part of the world right, they thought of it still sort of being part of heaven and so there was this idea that heaven and earth kind of became like a little more permeable at certain places right and so the this this idea of a floating altar floating altar seems to be connected to this so one that’s actually really important to the grail legend is the altar that was given to St. David of Wales, you know the patron saint of Wales. And the story about him is that his, his birth was foretold to his father by an angel in a dream. And his father was supposed to go out hunting when he was going to find three things he was going to find a stag, a fish and a honeycomb. And these, each of these items are some somehow foretelling or prophetic of St. David’s ministry so for instance, the angel says that as the honey is in the wax, so he that is David will hold a spiritual sense in a historical instrument, which I just mentioned because I think that’s a great way to sort of describe symbolism, or a way to describe universal history where you have these, these patterns that are above the historical but now they’re manifesting in historical ways. That was supposed to be what the life of the scene is. But there’s also this, this fish, right, and this fish on which he was supposed to be fed. Now, I think most people know that the fish is an ancient symbol for Christianity, where people sometimes don’t realize, especially in the down here in Texas, pretty much every other car has like a little fish bumper sticker on it. What most of the people who have those bumper stickers don’t probably understand is it’s not just that the fish is a symbol for Christianity, but it’s specifically a Eucharistic symbol. Yeah, it’s a symbol of the Eucharist. Right, right. So you got all these, you know, evangelicals, God bless them, driving around with the symbol of the Eucharist on the back of their bumpers. Because it’s the fish giving in a way it’s like the gift because the fish is giving itself to be eaten. Yes, that’s the mystery is like that’s why, like, or else, why would you have a fish as a symbol for Christianity, and it’s also like the treasure that’s drawn up out of death. There’s all these different things right. There’s another saint that’s really wonderful. His name is Elar, which is the same name as Hillary but it’s not Hillary of Poitiers, it’s a different Elar. Elar was just found, he was a foundling, he was found on the stone in the middle of a river. So they took him and they came, you know, the monks that found him took him, they came back the next day and on that stone in the middle of the river there was just a fish. So they took that and they fed the child with the fish and they came back every day. Every day for his whole childhood there was a fish and that’s what they fed him with and then he grew up to be this, you know, awesome wonder working saint and he could talk to animals and all this stuff right. I love all the best stuff of all men. I just love this stuff just enormously right. And so, of course, the, the, we’re talking about the floating altars. Right. Yeah, so I’m just mentioning the fish thing because the fish and the floating altars seem to be connected, and there’s of course this really important figure in the later grail stories, the rich fisherman or the fisher king, right, who’s going to become really important to the story of the grail. So just sort of like, you know, put a pin in that. I’m interested to hear your opinion on that because as a French person, I always see it as the sinner king, like that’s how I see it. But oh, interesting. Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah. So in the yeah so the earliest romantis we see the ancestor of the grail keepers is he’s made to catch this miraculous fish and that’s what gives him this title that’s passed down. And yeah, we can talk a little bit more about that but I want to note it, just note here that among Welsh saints and among Celtic saints. This, this idea, this there’s a connection to fishing into fish that seems to crop up over and over again. Now I mentioned all of this because the possession of these relics of the saints, altars, bales, bells, chalices, croisures, gospel books, etc. The possession of these relics is a really important theme. So especially in Welsh Christianity. So, you know, when when cod waller, those were like the last great Welsh king when he dies in battle. It’s, it’s prophesied that he will return, obviously this is what happens right. It’s prophesied that he will return when all of the ancient relics of the Welsh Church are revealed when they’re uncovered when they manifest again so it’s like, it’s like. And the idea is, it’s not that we’ve totally lost them is but they’re in hiding right now. And they’re there, you know, so there’s this idea that you have these families, you know, very much like what’s going on with the Ark in Ethiopia, okay but but obviously more obscure. There’s this idea that you have this this handed down tradition of the relics of one saint to somebody in their lineage, and that the, the person who has inherited them also inherits, you know, like that cloak of Elijah that you mentioned also inherits some degree of their grace. Yeah. I want to mention all of this to say that in the Celtic tradition and this is picked up in one of the later romances called the high history of the Holy Grail, the grail doesn’t have one form. The grail has five forms. And it is strongly implied that these forms, at least one of these forms is a bell, a saving bell. We’re not told what all of the forms are though. And the reason we’re not told what all the forms are I’ll read this again in our next video. The reason we’re not told what all of the forms are is that it says, it’s not good to speak to explicitly of the sacraments. So when Arthur goes into the chapel of the grail and he actually sees the grail in this particular version of the story. He sees it in the context of the mass of the liturgy. And the five forms of the grail are revealed to him and we’re told the final form is the chalice, but we’re not told what the other four are. Again, there’s a strong implication that at least one of them is the bell. Is a bell. Now, I want to say something a little bit about the idea of the relic and the power just to just to, because one of the things you mentioned, I think it’s important for people to see the connection is that when you believe in a world where symbolism happens, let’s say, there’s a sense in which, you know, you talked about how if someone carries the book of St. Columba and has a pure heart, then the relic will be effective. That is, the relic will become a vehicle, you know, a connection between the two. And so there’s a sense in which this is something which I think would have been implicitly understood in the different legends of these relics and goes into the grail, which is that the only night that can find the grail that can reach the grail has to have a pure heart. So there’s actually a notion, the fact that you receive it is almost like a proof that you’re a pure heart, right? There’s a connection where it’s because you have a pure heart, you have access to this, but then having it becomes a proof of the fact that you also have a pure heart. And so there’s an incarnational way of seeing the world where it’s not like there isn’t this arbitrary capacity. I say this because just because I was telling I was telling Richard recently that I just before that I watched the movie Constantine again, where you have this arbitrary idea that if you can get this relic, and if you can get this object, then you’re going to have a certain power that you can then use. And it’s almost like it’s almost like finding a grenade or finding a bomb. It’s completely arbitrary. It has nothing to do with virtue. It’s like Harry Potter style magic where you just have to like technically be proficient and learn the spells in the right way and and and know how to use these things almost like mechanical tools, but that is not the way in which ancient people thought there was a deep connection between a virtue and let’s say the power that the objects could have, and also kind of Christian faith and all of this, and the manner in which objects could manifest or have power in the world. So, all of this. So, so all of this, it’s important to remember because the relic is always a. It’s not just that the, that the relic has like the powers of the virtues of the saint, right. That this is God’s power right it’s God’s grace. We would say his, you know, like his energies it’s something that’s constantly given to us as a gift. Right. And so yeah, it’s not this mechanical thing. And that’s part of why we have to be really careful about how we talk about this stuff. And that’s why there would be a certain amount of secrecy about, you know, even just like a state whose relics we have. Right, we don’t parade them around the streets you know just you know for the, you know, exposing the mystery right at the very least we’re going to have it in the name of the church. So, if we have time relics or, you know, especially holy icons, things like this. We might bring out on certain feast days, right. There would be a time when the mystery is revealed but we don’t, you know, again, yeah, it’s not this mechanical thing I was literally just arguing with somebody about that on discord before this video started. And every time you say the word magical system, a fairy dies you know I can’t I really, I cannot stand systematized magic in in fantasy fiction. Yeah, so I want to, I want to mention one thing, because this will be really important for talking about the Well, later on but also you’re going to get just a tremendous kick out of it being who you are. Okay. So St. David is given this altar. Right. And so this happens when he is on. He is on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that he is. We’re told that as God gave Matthias in Judea, Christ in Jerusalem and Peter and Rome. So he has given St. David to be in the island of Britain. So the is the idea that St. David was sort of like the, the, the keeper of like the apostolic lineage in the island of Britain. And there’s, this is a long time, like before the Joseph of Arimathea stuff and all this right. And we’re told that the the patriarch of Jerusalem who’s the one consecrating David as Bishop gives him one of these altars says a certain Hollywood altar in which the Lord’s body had reposed. And this seems to be connected to that stone. There’s that stone in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I can’t remember the name right now. We can probably put a picture of it up here. But that stone on which Christ body was laid after he was brought down on the cross and that whole, all the legends and the stories surrounding what happens to Christ body when it’s brought down off the cross are going to be essential to understanding where the grail comes from. So we’re told that he’s given this Hollywood altar in which the Lord’s body had reposed, which abounded in innumerable virtues. And then we’re told never was this altar seen after the death of the Bishop St. David by any son of man, but it lies hidden, covered with skins. What? I know right? Strange legend. Yeah. And so and so and it says, hence, the common people call it the gift from heaven. So as we talk about the I just I knew you would love the fact that it’s covered in skin. Yeah. What else was you covered in? But there’s also another saint actually in in the same book, Saint Caranac, to whom we’re told that Christ gave an honorable altar from heaven, the color of which no person can comprehend. But this altar is also wrapped in skins most of the time. So it’s like this jeweled altar. That’s like a color that no one on earth has ever seen, but it’s it’s kept veiled. Right. So I’m going to mention I mentioned this because the key idea of the grail isn’t really just a chalice. Right. Obviously, that that becomes the most enduring image for kind of obvious reasons. In some senses, it’s because it’s the best image. Right. But the idea of the grail is really something which is hidden, which contains or has contained the body and the blood of Christ. Right. So there’s this altar which had somehow contained the Lord’s body. We’re not it’s not this not elaborated on because this in Jerusalem, there does seem to be a connection to this. The stone on which Christ body was laid. And keep in mind that most of the grail legends start popping up in Western Europe after the during the time of the Crusades. So people come from the east and they’re bringing back these these tales of like amazing relics that they’ve seen or like heard legends about. But that’s the key idea of the grail. So we’re told, for instance, like I mentioned, the high history of the grail, the grail has these five forms, only the last of which is the chalice. It’s going to be much later. We’ll talk about this in our next video when Robert de Boron, he has the grail become the cup of the last supper. Right. But that’s sort of the final form. You could say that’s the final form that the grail takes in the romances. Like once it takes that form, the grail is always that in all the future retellings of the story. Yeah, for sure. Because in Catia, it’s not clear that that’s what’s going on. Right. When you see it’s not that idea is not at all there. For sure. A vessel. It’s it’s for sure a Eucharistic vessel. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. And we’ll talk more about where that connection comes in in a little bit. So you have so you have this idea of like the altar, which is kind of like the ultimate version of this in the Celtic tradition, this hidden altar that comes from heaven that’s contained God’s body and which is now covered over its veiled. It’s covered in these garments of skin. Okay. So that’s the that’s kind of the first thread in what eventually becomes the grail story. The second one we could talk about is in the what I’ve called the Iberian Virgin and her grail. And if you want to know more about this, by the way, I know people love like where can I go read about this myself? This is a great book called The Virgin and the Grail by Joseph Gehring. And it’s it’s all about this image. So the image that you see manifesting in the Pyrenees right around the time of between the third and the fourth and a little bit after the Fourth Crusade. Right. You have these images that come up over and over again, these beautiful Romanesque frescoes. I mean, they’re really stunning. Whenever somebody’s like, I’d like to see more Western art in churches or something like that. I’m like, well, I would, too. But I don’t think we mean the same thing by that. I mean, like Renaissance stuff. And I mean, this stuff like this is this is like amazing, amazing stuff and very like it’s very sort of distinctly Western, but also really consonant with a Byzantine tradition. And so the first image of this seems to be and this isn’t it’s by an anonymous painter fresco. Do you call somebody who paints frescoes like a painter or they are? I don’t know. Anyway, he’s called the Master of St. Clement because we don’t know who he was. People didn’t sign their work. And but he was a really gifted iconographer. And in the apes of this church, the St. Clement of St. Clement’s in of tall in in the Pyrenees Mountains, you have this image of Christ in glory surrounded by the four creatures. And I mean, it’s very, very Byzantine image. If you’ve ever been to an Orthodox church, you’ve seen this somewhere, you’ll immediately recognize it. But then beneath him around the the around the base of the of the apes of the church, you see the choir of the apostles. Right. So the twelve apostles plus plus some. But then in their in their center and sort of standing as like the first among equals among them is the mother of God. And the mother of God is standing there and she’s holding you can kind of see it in the cover art right here because this is holding a cup of some holding a dish. It’s a dish. It’s a dish. Yeah. So the word grail means it means like a large shallow serving dish and actually specifically specifically it’s a serving dish for serving fish. That’s what you serve in a grill. And this is in Christianity, it says the virgin he sees this virgin coming in holding this large grail in which you might serve like a pike or a lamprey. In other words, like a very large fish. So again, thinking about fish here. Right. There’s a container for food, a container for fish, an altar or an altar like a tombstone, all of these images of of these containers, but that are also. Yeah, that are also secret that are heavenly all of this is kind of coming together. Right. So there’s something there’s something about this and this this original image seems to be ugly of the ascension. I should have prefaced it by saying this original image seems to have been of the ascension. So in the Byzantine tradition, right, when we portray the ascension, it’s essentially exactly like this. We show Christ in glory. He’s being taken up to heaven on the like the true but thrown and then beneath him, we have all of the apostles and the midst of the apostles, we have the mother of God, and she’s flanked on either side right by two angels. You’ve done some really great videos. It’s been a while, but you’ve done some really great videos about this icon of the ascension, right, which is an icon of the church. What the church was at that moment, what it is now. And, and of course, the way that we expect. Yeah, it’s an eschatological vision as well. It’s also how because it says even in scripture that that Christ will return in the same manner that he that he left. So this seems to be a, a reworking of the Byzantine image of the ascension, but what’s different about it, and this is the crucial difference. And this is about 50 years before Christian wrote his, his grail story, which is the first real grail romance, right. So 50 years before that this guy painted this image, and he shows the Virgin Mary holding in her hand this grail and in the grail. There are flames shooting up out of it. So it’s not totally sure what’s in the grail. The author of this book has some theories. I don’t think they’re all like totally right because there’s some things I mean he’s he’s writing about Christian ritual from like an outsider perspective, whereas anybody who’s like, you know, lived in the church and been to, been to liturgy enough times and things like this. But, but on the whole, I think he’s right in that he says that the contents of the bowl are either, you know, it’s either the Eucharist, or it’s chrism. And that for our purposes, it doesn’t really matter which one of those ideas right that that in other words like this, this fiery bowl, right, contains. Let’s say it shows the way in which the grace of the Holy Spirit has been given to the church, which the, the, the, the creator of this fresco saw as being mediated through the incarnational experience of the church which, which we understand through the, the mother of God. So he, so it would be so this other disease see this as a kind of small image of Pentecost. Yes, while he sent him, he doesn’t talk about Pentecost so much he just talk about it a little bit again that’s where I think, you know, because in the The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that in Armenian depictions of the ascension is very often the same. So that, you know, where you do have the mother of God there. And I actually have seen some Byzantine icons that have her there. I’m not the one that’s in our church, but like my home parish. But I have seen that a few times. So it’s a very old tradition. People say people don’t like it because it’s not the one we ended up with. But yeah, the idea it’s a very old tradition to have the mother of God in the center. So it’s, I mean, this is a little aside, but once my daughter for an art class decided that she wanted to do an icon of the Pentecost, and she was just doing it like totally from memory having grown up in the church and things and she just, even though the fresco that we have on the ceiling of our church. It’s like right on right on the other side of the Apes on on the other side of the icon assess from the Apes. We have a very traditional Pentecost icon, nobody seated in the middle. And that’s the, that’s, you know, that’s the icon that she’s seen in her entire growing up but when she did the icon. She put the mother of God right in the middle. Like it was just like a normal, you know, here’s Mary here’s baby Jesus here’s the church around them and like, yeah, so that’s, she’s like oh that’s, that’s really interesting. So anybody’s interested by the way I wrote an article specifically about that cool on the two women on the two images of the church. Let’s say that the, the, the church of the Jews that are the Gentiles are the inner woman and the outer woman, and so how it’s related to to Pentecost to ascension Pentecost so I’ll put a link of that in the description. Yeah, that’d be great. Right after this image, what we have what we see then happening in these in churches all across let’s say this, the certain region of Spain is, and then into into France, we see, we see this image of, and it very quickly changes into just Mary holding a chalice. But we share this image popping up in Romanesque iconography from the century again and again and again. And it’s worth noting that the, the, the Romancers, who wrote down their versions of the grail stories right that their patrons their original patrons were these troubadour Crusader kings and Lords, who originally came from this region. Right, so that so that they’re coming east, they’re going east for the Crusades they’re coming back this iconography pops up and then about 50 years 50 to 100 years later. That’s when all the grow grail romances start showing up in Western Europe. So I find this very interesting of course, it is in Christian it is the virgin, it is a virgin, maybe not the virgin but it is a virgin, who is carrying the grail in the procession in the in the Fisher Kings Palace. Okay, so the third seed of the grail story and this is where things get a little weird. The third seed, you don’t think flying alters is weird enough. I mean you need much weirder. I mean, yeah. Okay, so we have this. We have this icon of, you know, this is some, we call it like the Holy Mandillion or the icon made without hands right if you’ve been to an orthodox church you’ve probably seen this icon right it’s, it’s, it’s weird because it’s like an icon of a towel, with the face of Jesus on it right. And this goes back to this legend of, of, which is, let’s say, attested in some of our earliest Christian historical sources, right. So much so that you know I mean I personally. I mean it’s a feast of the church I take for granted that it’s a, it’s a real thing that happened right, I have no reason to doubt doubt it right. But this legend that essentially there is King Avgar of Edessa, right, who had desired an icon of Christ. And so we sent his his people to to make a copy of Christ face like to make a picture of a painting, a painting right or to get something of Christ, you know, Avgar is sick. And in some versions of the story he’s like with leprosy, but actually, very importantly, in other versions of the story, especially in the Middle Ages as the legend gets sort of elaborated. He’s paralyzed. In other words, of course paralysis is also always sort of associated with let’s say infertility, and all these things right so you have a paralyzed King, a wounded King. Right. And, and so he sends for something of the Lord’s which will, which will be able to heal him. And basically what happens when the, when the, the people they come to draw Christ is that they can’t do it. Like they’re actually not able to, to get him, they can’t get his image. And actually in one of the remember what I said about the grail having five forms right. In one of the versions of the story in the Middle Ages, the reason they can’t get his image is because as they start trying to draw him, his image constantly changes, and it goes from being a little child to being a 30 year old man to being Christ and his passion to being the right and it moves through these like all these different things right and they can’t do it so finally Christ basically makes them an icon. And it’s, it’s at least of his face but possibly of his entire body. Yeah, he imprints his, his right form onto the clock. Right. And so he gives that to them, and they take it back to the city of Odessa. And there are all kinds of this is people don’t understand now. Like we understand a little bit in, in like the Orthodox Church because like again we we have this icon and a lot of places and we do have a feast for it’s one of the three feasts of the Lord in the month of August. But this is a big deal in the Middle Ages, people copied and recopied and copied and recopied the story, many of the Crusaders, who obviously Odessa was was taken by the Western Crusaders and during the first Crusade it was retaken. And then in the Fourth Crusade of course Constantinople was sacked. And by the time of the Fourth Crusade, the icon of the Holy Face the Holy Mendelian was in Constantinople at Le Caronis. And if you go back and you read the, the first hand eyewitness accounts of the people who saw this icon. But then you also if you read the, the legend so so there were there were legends that got copied into Latin from a pretty early date, the lot of these Crusaders brought back West with them. And you start looking at, let’s say the, the, the theological connection between, or not the theological connection but you start looking at the connection between the, what the things that are supposed to happen in the Grail Chapel or in the Grail Palace, right, or the Grail Castle, if you look at those and then you look at the rituals that were associated with the veneration of this icon in Odessa and then in Constantinople later, they map very tightly. And, and of course there’s a lot of other stuff obviously the spear is, you know, the Holy Spear, the Lance of Longinus, whose feast day was in the, in the Orthodox Church was just a few days ago, by the way, from when we’re recording this. That, that comes up during the time of the Crusades right because it’s uncovered, or it’s believed to be uncovered during the Siege of Antioch and all this other stuff is going on right. So all of the stuff is kind of coming West, and in particular, we’re there, there. And I don’t totally understand, because obviously there’s the, you have basically like three versions of this idea of like a cloth that has Christ’s face on it right, you have the Shroud of Turin or the burial shroud. You have the, like the cloth that St. Veronica is supposed to have pressed against Christ’s face, came away with the impression of the icon, and then you have this, the Holy Mandillion, the icon made without hands. But in a lot of these earlier stories, those all basically seem to be the same thing. Well for sure they all seem to, at least the one, the earliest one is the, is the Mandillion tradition. Yes. That’s very old. So this is, this is where it gets a little kind of mind blowing. And I don’t even know how much I want to say about this but in the early, in the earliest descriptions that we have of people who went to venerate the Mandillion and wrote about it, these are first hand eyewitness accounts. It’s not just the face. Okay. That is actually a cloth that has been folded. But if you unfold the entire thing, it would give you this impression of Christ’s body at least from like the waist up. And that it was, and that this impression was made with Christ’s sweat and with his blood. So it’s more like the, the Turin, the shroud. Yeah, yeah. So but typically speaking, what they would do is that this whole thing would be folded up. In fact, one of the names for the cloth means like the cloth that’s been folded eight times or something like this, and they would fold the cloth up. And then they would, so that only the face could be seen and you could only see the face, I mean this is, it’s heavily protected. So you could only see the face if you look through the certain aperture which you’re only allowed to do at sort of certain times. Right. And so, so it’s, it’s, it’s, again, it’s this idea of here’s something that, that, that contains Christ’s body that contains Christ’s blood. Right, or at least the impression of them. Yeah, we did. I mean it’s a container for Christ’s body. Right. And so, all of this is all of this is tied then with the, the Byzantine apocryphal tradition surrounding Joseph of Arimathea. So, Joseph of Arimathea who was put into prison and released after the Emperor of Vespation was healed by the Holy cloth of leprosy. And so, these, you know, this is the, this is the legend that’s found in the, there’s a, there’s a, the gospel of Nicodemus and the acts of Pilate these two apocryphal works that are really important in our tradition. When I say they’re apocryphal I don’t mean that we totally discount them. I think maybe by now people know that, but that is, that is the source of the, sorry the source of the Anastasis icon is from the gospel. Exactly. Yeah, so, so obviously a really important part of our, of our tradition. So Joseph, Joseph, yeah, so Joseph takes the blood or he takes the cup or he carries it. He’s closely associated originally with his burial cloth, especially in the, in the rituals surrounding its veneration at Edessa or burial cloth or the mandolin or whatever you want to call it. He’s very closely associated with that in the tradition of the city of Edessa. Now, the other place where this comes in would be two, two things. One is that during the first, especially the first millennia of the church going into like the 13th and 14th century there’s a really rich tradition of Byzantine Eastern Christian, mystical commentaries on the liturgy, right. You could basically say it’s like doing allegorical commentary on the liturgy except that nobody knows what allegory means anymore and so I don’t like to use it that word because people get confused. But it’s just it’s ways of sort of let’s say interpreting and explicating the mystery of the divine liturgy. Of course the most, most important one of these is probably St. Maximus the confessor’s mystical ecclesial mystagogy, which I’ve talked about a lot and I’m a big fan of that particular work. One of the things I love about it is that I only understand maybe like a fourth of it because because he’s like the liturgy has these four or five senses and he explains the first sense. I’m like, OK, I get that. He explains the second sense. I’m like, OK, I get that. And then he starts explaining like the third, fourth, fifth senses. And I’m like, I don’t I can’t even know what the subject is. I don’t even can’t even. Yeah, right. Like I don’t even like my my I’m such a baby, you know, spiritually, like I have no idea what that’s even about. Right. Yeah, exactly. But. So in the in these commentaries, OK, and I’m just going to pull up my notes here because because there’s like a whole chain of custody for this information. But basically in these commentaries, what we get is this idea. So you find this in like St. Germanus’s commentary, this idea that there is a let’s say like a polyvalence or an overlapping sense of meaning between the chalice or the patterns. The the what’s it called the epitaph you know, like the like the cloth that has which is exactly which is an image of the shroud basically right. Right. It has the body of Christ stitched or painted on it and that which is on the altar. Right. So between that, between the the patterns and the and actually the epitaph seems to have developed and I’m sure there are people out there who know way more about liturgical history than I do. But it seems to have developed originally from the veil, which is placed over the chalice and over the patterns. So those seem to be related, which, you know, intuitively, like on a symbolic level, all that stuff makes sense. Right. Yeah. But then you have the then you have the so so there’s a relationship between these things and then the deacon who carries them out during the liturgy. And such that we are told, and this is in a Byzantine liturgical commentary, which is then translated into Latin, which then is like reach reworked into another Latin comment commentary on the Latin mass and like there’s three or four levels of this versions of this that come to the West right about all the time, right about the time that all the grail legends are popping up in which we are told that the deacon at this moment is imaging the role of Joseph of Arimathea. Really? So this stuff is like deeply and of course, I mean, in in. Well, I mean, I guess because he carried you could say really immediately because he carried the body right down and he put the body in a tomb. And think about right. Think about how heavily Joseph of Arimathea features in the Eastern liturgy. Right. That long, beautiful, the noble Joseph, that we sing every year. We sing it during Holy Week. We sing it again on the Sunday of the Merbearers. Right. This, you know, so this this the role that he had in taking the body of Christ down and is carrying it. He’s he’s so closely connected in the Eastern liturgical tradition, not just in like the Byzantine version that’s come down to to us in our church, but also like in the Syrian tradition. He’s so closely connected to the act of carrying the body of Christ that that’s the connection that these these liturgical like these mystical commentaries on the mass and on the divine liturgy. That’s the connection that they make. Yeah. And also Joseph offers the vessel. Yes. He actually offers the tomb like he pays for it. Right. He he buys the tomb. And so he offers this vessel for the body. And so it’s like, yeah, it all makes sense, like very in a very immediate way, notwithstanding all the legends which are going to come later. Right. So the legends about like Joseph coming to England and all this stuff that comes much later. Okay. Comes much later. Right. They make so much sense, like with all this symbolism, right. We know what England is. Right. So that’s the thing, though, is is one of the things I want to point to with with something like the grail legends where you have where you have a clear story that is clearly non-historical, let’s say. But also so fundamentally true that we keep trying to tell it over and over again. Right. Like the Holy Grail, as far as I’m concerned, the Holy Grail is like the great story of Western civilization. Like it’s the big problem. Right. The fact that the fact that in the early stories of the grail, I’ll talk more about this in the next video, but in the early stories of the veil, the grail, the the grail quest is achieved. But the more we retell it and the longer it goes, the more unattainable the grail becomes. Okay. I think that’s I think that’s really, really telling. Yeah. So, yeah, but it’s also it also has to do like if you understand what’s going on when the grail legends are appearing and you notice that, you know, there’s the idea that there’s a mystery which is no longer accessible. To me, this is something that especially as a as a as someone as an orthodox person, I can see as related to the one of the problems which comes in the late Middle Ages as this nominalism gets set in as certain branches of. So it’s almost as if mythically there’s an intuition that there’s something off and that there’s something that we used to have access to or that we should have access to that we could. We don’t anymore. Like there’s an aspect of the mystery which has been kind of that has been kind of pulled away from us. And and and so there’s there’s I think there’s it’s related to the schism. I think so. Yeah. So this is where I’m going to get into get myself into a little bit. You shouldn’t say these things so that I should be the one that get I can be the one that gets in trouble with some of your listeners. Okay. But a lot. Okay. But but there are a lot of serious grail scholars out there who have pointed out the fact that the grail legend begins to arise in Western Europe exactly at the time that people start arguing about transubstantiation. Right. Right. At the time that Baron Garius and all these people, they’re like, they’re like, is it a symbol? Is it what is it? This is it that right? Just right at the point that of course, that’s where somebody like Alexander Schmemann sort of points the original. That’s where maybe things start to go wrong. You know, everyone’s got maybe their date for when things start to go wrong. But what everybody agrees with on is that something obviously went wrong. Right. But but right at the time that the secularism begins to be born and that that rift in in Western sacramental theology starts to slowly widen in what’s eventually going to become the Reformation and all the things that kind of are downstream from that. Right at the time that was happening is when the grail story starts to manifest itself in Western Europe. And that culminates the the idea of the unattainable grail culminates right around the time of the Fourth Crusade, which is kind of the death knell in in any hopes of reunion between the Eastern and Western Church. You know, I think, you know, my reading and I think a lot of I think there’s a lot of evidence for this is that historically people still thought they were going to be able to get the band back together. Yeah. Right until, you know, Latin Crusaders sat constant and noble and they put a prostitute on the throne of the patriarch of Constantinople in the Church of Hagia Sophia. And at that point, they were like, this is not happening. Maybe maybe maybe like, you know, you know, maybe maybe this is not going to work out after. Yeah. Right. So and I and I think you’re right. Like, I think it’s connected to those things. And it’s part of what makes the story of the grail so important and also so tragically painful. And when I what I want to do in the next video is to start going through some of the romances of the grail. Yeah. And I want to start with Christian because even though his version is not, let’s say, the definitive version, I think in some ways it’s still the best. Yeah. And I think that actually people have been reading it profoundly wrong for a very long time that everyone thinks it’s unfinished and everyone thinks Percival doesn’t get the grail. And I think that’s totally wrong. Oh, right. Yeah. So just tease that for next video. So maybe so what I my last words are going to be something like, even now in the discussion that we’ve had talking about the sources of where the grail legend comes from, we noticed that there is something about the grail itself, which is related to the West. That has to do with the West. If we understand the West in the sense of the place where the sun sets, that that Western edge of the world. And we always have to remember now we live in America. And so this has kind of been thrown up. There’s been a stretching out of the West, you could say, but for the ancients, Britain was the edge of the world, right? It was it was represented that Eastern that Western edge of reality where the barbarians were still there. And it was still kind of a wild land that had to be tamed. You know, we remember that the Giants were there. There’s all these these these stories about what it is that Britain represents. So there’s a sense in which all these stories are kind of coming together and manifesting the West and manifesting this notion of the container and the support for something sacred, something which holds the sacred in it, the altar, this chat, the cup, the chalice, the grail, the cloth, all of these are all these supports. And it’s also a book. There’s also a version of the grail, Midledge, which it’s a book. It’s all these idea of the of the support of of something from above. Right. And so it is, of course, related to the feminine. And so we can already see that why so much of the madness of the grail stories that have come to us recently. And Dan Brown, I’m talking to you in this this this this statement is they wanted to make it about right. They all wanted to make it about the feminine and they’re totally right that it is about this about the feminine. But we also need to understand it rather as something which is pointing beyond the kind of crass, the crass way in which people like Dan Brown have wanted to bring about like as if all these mysteries, all these stories, what they’re pointing to is some historical fact that everybody wants to hide. And that’s it. There’s no more meaning to it than that. It’s all about hiding something that happened that nobody wants you to find out about. Yeah. So that’s really like if it was that, then she just all throw it in the trash anyways, because it’s not it’s not really interesting. So I think that I think that the things you’re saying are so something that’s really curious to me about this grail stuff right is that essentially all of the pieces are there in the East, but the East never has a grail story. They never have a grail legend. They never have a grail romance. And in general, the East never it’s they just never develop. Let’s say imaginative literature to the same degree, even like, you know, like the great orthodox novels like Dostoyevsky or something like that are, you know, they’re like, you know, super, super like, like in your face and very like grounded and gritty and realistic and things like this. And it’s not that we don’t have like wonder tales or or things, but when we have them, they tend to be in hagiography or in stories of miracles and things like this. And there’s like a like just this experience of a much more proximate experience of the divine. Of the miraculous of relics of saints of angels of all these different things that is there initially and say like the age of the saints like the fifth and sixth century, you know, whales or somewhere like that, but tends to starts to be lost in the West. And as that distance begins to stretch out, you have something very much like. And this is this is, I mean, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot because I’m I write fiction, obviously, I love talking about fiction, right? Fiction is the garment of skins in which St. David’s altar is wrapped. Right. It’s our inability to to come to some of these things in like a really bald way, like a really open way. We can’t do it anymore. And I say I say this, you know, as a. Obviously, I’m a practicing Christian. I’m a member of the Orthodox Church, but I’m also a Western person. Yeah. And that hasn’t changed. And I’m like, I’m totally as much as I can be. I try to be aware of what that means. And what, you know, obviously, there’s some great things about that. There’s also some some big limitations that I’m trying to work through. And I think that I think that you could say the grail romances, right. And the way that they develop, they develop precisely at this time that something is being lost, that there’s a rift that’s happening. And they become a way to take that thing that’s being lost as sort of rapid and this protective covering of skins, which becomes poetry and romance and all this stuff. And it’s of nostalgia. There’s a sense in the grail of nostalgia. Yeah, especially the later, especially the later version like Robert de Boron, this this deep sense that. Man, if we could have if we could have, I mean, this is all the way back in in Christian, like in his his romance, which is the first grail romance like that sense that if he could have asked the right question, he could have asked what the grail. Yeah, if you could have asked the right question, then he would like then the land would have been healed. Yeah, you know that that in other words, communion would have been restored, which I think actually again happens in that romance and people miss it. So we’ll talk about. All right. Well, that’ll be that’ll be the way to end this to see how is it that Richard thinks that that that kids ain’t got it right. Well, I love kids is romance and so I’m really excited to find out about it. So everybody, thanks for your time. Thanks for attention. Of course, it’s just the beginning of our of our discussing the ground. So we’re looking forward to the next episode. Having an announcement. Go for it. Go back. God’s dog. Oh, and go back. God’s duck. All right, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.