https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KhfvmfsEANI
So hello everybody, I am with Richard Roland, who at this point doesn’t need any introduction. And we’re really excited to go into our second part of the Grail symbolism. We did the last video with a really great reaction. And so Richard, take it away, let’s start us off. [“The Grail Symbolism”] This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. [“The Grail Symbolism”] So yeah, a lot of people really liked the last video. We also got a little bit of, just a small amount of controversy that was sparked by the last video as well, which is always exciting to see. And I wanna reiterate that one of the reasons, actually I recorded a podcast episode about this with somebody recently. And then when we got to the end, we realized that neither of us had hit the record button. Oh no. So now there’s just a lost conversation out there. And it was, when I was over, the guy that I was recording with, he’s a priest, he was really, really upbeat about it. And really, you know, he was just like, listen, if this conversation isn’t good enough for us to enjoy, then there’s no point in doing it. So don’t feel bad about it. Now we have a cool lost episode. But anyway, more about that maybe in the future. But one of the things we were talking about is one of the reasons that I’m so interested in the Arthurian stories. In the Grail particularly, but in really all the Arthurian stuff. I mean, I’ve got entire bookshelf over here, just mostly Arthurian stuff, two or three shelves. Is because I think that the Arthurian myth, yeah, I don’t know, you wanna call it a mythos or a cycle, or because, you know, it’s like a group of legends. There’s no canonical, you know, definitive, this is the authoritative Arthur. But it kind of contains within itself, everything that’s good and noble, but also everything that’s a problem about being a Western person, right? And I really wanna say that both the good and the bad are in there. I hope that, you know, as we’re doing these Grail videos, I mean, I’m a Western person, you know, I’m not anti-Western, I’m just trying to sort of deal with where I am in the world and in history. And I found the Grail legends to be really helpful to do. What was the controversy? I don’t even know. Some people are like, oh, well, you’re just saying, you know, all these, you know, things, the West is terrible, blah, blah, blah. You know, because we got into the end, you know, there’s this whole school of thought, this whole school of thought of, which I tend to agree with, that traces the origins of the Grail legend to the Fourth Crusade and the Holy Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin and all this stuff, right? So obviously that stuff is, it’s a little, still a little historically painful. If it wasn’t historically painful, the Pope wouldn’t have apologized for it, you know, this last week, I think, he’s making a tour of like Crete and other places. So it’s still a very historically painful for a lot of people. And my point in bringing that stuff up is not to like make a thing out of it, it’s just to say, historically, if that stuff didn’t happen, we wouldn’t get the Grail story, right? Like the one thing, all the stuff flows out of this sense of ruptured communion. And of course, also these debates about communion itself, which kind of manifest in the West right around the time that the Grail legends kind of become a thing. Okay, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, so I just, you know, just wanna kind of put that out there. When I’m talking about the stuff, it’s because I really do deeply love it, especially the story we’re gonna talk about today, which is a Cretan’s story of the Grail. And there’s got a French title, which I’m not going to try to embarrass myself to a native French speaker by saying, but anyway, so it’s the story of the Grail. And it is the first Grail romance. So before this, there are no Holy Grail stories as such. And I would just wanna point out that this Grail story is not exactly the version that people remember. Because the version that people remember has like these Indiana Jones and Monty Python layers on it. But ultimately it goes back to, for English speaking people, usually it goes back to Sir Thomas Mallory’s L’Amour d’Arthur, which has basically the final form of the French version of the story, which is like the French, the Lancelot-Grail-Vulgate cycle. That’s what Mallory is working from. So that’s what most of us actually know. This comes a long time before that. It’s the first ever Grail romance. And I think it’s also in many ways, the most symbolically insightful. But I just wanna point out that this story is a really beautiful story. It’s weird, it’s rich, it’s wonderful. So don’t just like sit down and read this to like strip mine it for symbolic content or something like that. Because there’s always a danger for people like us to do that. But this is, I mean, the story, just the beginning of the story, just the first three or four pages, I’m gonna be reading today out of this edition, by the way, this is the complete Romances of Chrétien Betoy. It’s translated by David Staines, I think is how you say his name. You can find this on Amazon. It’s a pretty good translation. One of the things I like about it is the fact that it’s a prose translation, which I’m not generally a big fan of doing, although I had done some of these myself, I’m not generally a big fan of doing verse to verse translations from other languages, because it’s just very difficult to pull off the effect of the normal verse. And so in that case, what I would rather have is like a really good prose translation that would then support my attempts to go back and kind of wrestle with the poetry in the original language. So anyway, this is a good translation. And I just wanna say that my interest in the Grail legends and the Grail stories actually begins with sort of an encounter in the liturgy that I had. And it was this beautiful 6 a.m. divine liturgy. There’s a Greek church near my house and one year during the Nativity Fast. In fact, we’re just a couple of days, as we’re recording this, the day after like the two or three year anniversary of when this happened. Okay. Okay. The day after the, it was a 6 a.m. liturgy for St. Nicholas. So that was yesterday, you know, for us. And I was in the church and it was this, you know, it’s this beautiful sort of Basilica style church. It’s one of the best churches in the North Texas area. It’s totally dark, just lit by candles. And there was like one chanter, just really, really good Byzantine chanter. And it was just him and maybe one or two other people with him and they were doing the whole service. And it was during the Cherubic hymn. And you see the, you know, they’re coming up the center of the church with the gifts. And as they’re doing this, you know, I see, here’s the altar server bearing the taper and the deacon with a patent and the priest with the chalice. And everything is dark and there’s light, there’s lights and incense and everything. And I just sort of had this flashback to reading this romance and just this realization is like, this is, I’m in the grail chapel right now. Like what is happening? And some other things, some other pretty incredible things happened later that morning. But for me, that was the moment that kind of tied it all together. There was a moment of intuition during the liturgy. And then that’s kind of what all of this came out of. So there was an English occultist named A.E. Waite who wrote a book called, I think it’s called The High History of the Holy Grail. And it’s pretty interesting. Actually, I think it’s called The Holy Grail History, Legend and Symbolism, but maybe he also wrote a book called The High History of the Holy Grail. Anyway, Waite is an occultist. He was a theosophist. I don’t really recommend anybody go and read his stuff. I think he’s sketchy as heck. But he was part of this group of people in England. And most of them were like, sort of you could say disaffected Anglicans. Yeah. It sort of felt like the mystical aspects of Christianity were missing from their church. And this is all tied up with the whole movement of Celtic romanticism, right? Which is to say, you know, it’s tied up with nationalism, Celtic romanticism. Basically Celtic romanticism is the idea that Celtic people as a race, okay? And I put that in scare quotes, as a race they’re like more naturally intuitive and spiritual and wild and free and all this stuff. It’s like, you know, like Enya’s first album, basically. And… Oh, that’s hilarious, man. Yeah. I actually- It was a nationalist moment in revenge of the whole, like of the Anglo-Saxon. Yeah. It was like a thousand years too late, but it was like this sort of like revenge for the Anglo-Saxon invasion where you had all of these Anglo-Saxons, you know, suddenly saying, well, we got to get back to our Celtic roots, right? Yeah. And so that’s what a lot of this was tied up with. And so one of the things that people started trying to search for, and there’s still people who are hung up on this today, is this idea of like reconstructing or finding like this lost Celtic liturgy. This idea that there would be a Celtic expression of Christianity that would be authentic to the British Isles in a way that Latin right Roman Catholicism and then also Anglicanism as something that developed out of that. Yeah. That it would be authentic in a way that those weren’t. Yeah. And so these guys looked back to the Grail story and they looked at it and they said, oh, look, it’s so liturgical. There’s chalices and you know, it’s the body and blood of Christ, all this stuff. It’s so liturgical. This must, this legend must actually be about the true Celtic lost Celtic liturgy. And all of these stupid continental romancers turned it into this adventure story and they got it totally wrong. So a lot of the guys hated the romances because of that. And what I would like to say is these guys are- But that’s interesting. It’s interesting that they would see, they would see the Grail legend as a nostalgia for the lost Celtic Christianity in general. Like that when the Anglo-Saxons brought in the Latin mass and kind of imposed Rome on the, let’s say, on the British Isles, then that would have been, like they would have lost something and that would be a memory of that in the King Arthur. Cause King Arthur is from before that time, like obviously. And yeah, that’s the whole thing is a complicated question. And I’m actually working on putting a new podcast together for ancient faith, which will hopefully be all about the history of the English conversion. But I haven’t had- Another podcast, are you serious? I haven’t had time to work on it this fall, but I’m hoping that maybe January, February, that’ll drop. So keep an eye out for that. And if you like, cause that whole question of conversion, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is really interesting to me. But basically I think these guys are, they have the right intuition, but they totally misread the romances cause in some senses they’re blinded a little bit by this sort of, you know, this Celtic romanticism, right? So what I want to basically try to demonstrate by doing a close reading of Chrétien’s romance is two things. One is that this structure of the story itself, or at least those parts, the story really has two parts that are, they’re connected by a medieval technique called interlace, which is basically where you have threads of two stories that move in and out of each other at multiple points. This is very common in Arthurian stories, which is why if you’ve ever sat down and you’ve just tried to read an Arthurian story and you’re like, oh, it’s Christmas and we’re at the court. And then a little white dog runs in and he’s followed by like three stags and a princess who’s weeping. And then some guy goes to deal with that problem. And on the way he gets challenged. And then we learn about this night that, and it’s like, why can’t we just stick with one plot thread, right? But it’s because these plot threads are interlaced. So they kind of weave in and out of each other. And you just have to sort of like set aside your modern three act narrative expectations and kind of just hang on. So this story has basically two threads like that. One is about Percival and the other is about Gawain. But at least the Percival part of the story is fundamentally structured according to the pattern of the divine liturgy. And I think this is absolutely indisputable. The second thing that I wanna try to prove is that everyone has been reading the story in completely the wrong way, or at least- Everyone has been. Everyone, everyone. I’m the first one to get it right, Jonathan. You guys heard it here. Now, let me, I’ll nuance that a little bit. I like to say that provocatively because it gets people’s attention. But everyone believes that the story is unfinished and that Percival never finds the grail. And everyone in the middle ages believe that, which is why I have a book right here. If I can pick it up without knocking down all of the other books stacked on top of it, I have a book right here that has all of the medieval continuations of the Percival romance. So everybody was unsatisfied with the way that the story doesn’t end. And they try to write their own continuations of it. But what I wanna argue is that if you read the text closely, you will see that Percival actually does succeed. He actually does achieve the grail. So let’s talk a little bit about the story. So Percival, we don’t actually learn his name until about halfway through the poem. In fact, he doesn’t learn his name until about halfway through the poem. Percival begins totally without identity. He only knows himself in relation to his mother. And so when he’s first asked, what’s your name? Somebody asked him, what’s your name? He says, well, my name is Dear Son, because that’s what his mother calls him. Or in relation to his servants who call him Dear Master. So it’s like, well, what’s your other name? Well, my other name is Dear Master, right? He doesn’t know himself though in relation to his father. So this is a very important detail in Percival’s story. His father is a knight who died in battle due to a grave injury to the loins. And the reason that his mother will not tell him who he is, won’t tell him his name or who his father was is because she doesn’t want him to become a knight. She doesn’t want him to grow up and die the same way that his father did. So the other hint that we get about Percival’s identity is his clothing. So clothing, the putting on and taking off of garments. And often we’re told that their garments of course hair or garments of skins in this story, like very literally explicitly. That’s very important to pay attention to as you read this romance, not just with Percival. I’m gonna give some examples of that, but also with the other, like the side characters as well. We’re told when his clothing is first described, we are told that he dresses like a Welshman, which is not a compliment as far as Kretian is concerned. And he had ideas he’s sort of like dressed in like, buskins, like, you know, he looks like a rustic, right? Yeah, he’s rustic. And by his activities. So his hobby, the thing that he likes to do is he has this javelin and then he, and it talks and spends a whole lot of time about talking about him, like he’s walking along, he’s throwing the javelin north, south, east and west towards every point of the compass. And the idea I think here is that his identity is scattered and it’s focused, right? Now I said, and I gave reasons for this in our previous video, but I said that essentially this poem follows the structure of the divine liturgy. And you could say- And wouldn’t that also make sense if you’re saying that his identity is scattered or that it’s, that that’s would also, the idea of his father dying from an injury in the loins would definitely go with that. Yes, right, yeah. Those two things are really, really closely connected. So, and I think that you could say the liturgical structure of this poem, you could chalk it up to two things. One is there does seem to be lots and lots and lots of evidence that the Grail legends developed at least partially out of Byzantine liturgical commentaries like that of St. Germain. So, I mean, that’s sort of, there’s an explicit connection there, but also I believe, and I think that you believe that the liturgy is the shape of everything, right? So whether or not you can demonstrate that Ketien ever spoke to somebody who’s seen a Byzantine divine liturgy, although he almost certainly had because all his patrons were these crusader families, but whether or not he’d actually seen like an Eastern right divine liturgy or read that kind of a commentary, I think because the structure of the story is so fundamentally symbolic and cosmic that it’s unavoidable. So if we wanted to sort of look at this through the lens of liturgy, we can see this different liturgical commentators talk about the way that we are before we come together for the synopsis, before we come together for the gathering, right? Which is not just a gathering of us as a people, as like a congregation, but it’s also a gathering of our scattered identity. We’ve been out in the world, we’ve been pulled this way by this thing and that way by that thing, and we’re just all, we’re all scattered in dissolute and all of these things being pulled together when we decide we’re going to enter into the church. And so what we see is that at each part of the story, Percival has these changes that come with a movement up the, you could say like a movement up the ontological hierarchy, right? So everything’s a mountain, right? Or a tree, right? So as he moves up to each level, he has to change clothing, he has to be given a set of instructions for how to behave himself on the next level. And then what we see happening in the story is him doing or not doing that well, depending on the case. So in this case, he begins with a totally scattered loss of identity. And then he’s off in the forest, he’s playing with his javelin, he’s doing all this stuff, and suddenly he hears some knights riding through the bushes, like in the forest, right? And he’s in the forest Sauvage, so the savage forest, the wasteland. The wild forest. The wild forest. And as he hears the knights coming, he actually thinks that they’re demons because of the sound they’re making. It’s a big, scary sound, he’s never heard anything like this. And this is actually where we find out how much Percival knows about God, which is really important because he doesn’t know much. He’s been taught the creed, he’s been taught the our father, and he’s been taught that he’s supposed to make the sign of the cross when he hears something coming, or when something scares him to frighten the demons away. But he says, I’m not going to make the sign of the cross. Instead, I’m gonna wait here, and when the demons appear, I’m gonna strike them with my javelin and kill them. So that’s his attitude. And when he sees the knights come through, he sees them, and he immediately changes his mind. He says, I’ve sinned grievously, to call them devils, because my mother told me, no, I don’t tell when she said to me that angels were the most beautiful creatures there are except God, who is the most beautiful of all. Here, I behold the Lord God, I believe, for one of them is so beautiful that the others, so help me God, have not attempted this beauty. So he thinks he sees the most beautiful knight, and the other knight’s with him, he thinks, I must be seeing God and his angels. So he’s very confused, he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with, and basically, the knights set him straight, and they explained, well, we’re not gods, we’re not angels, we’re knights. And Percival is like, what is a knight? I’ve never heard of this before. So they start having this conversation, and this is when things get really interesting, because he walks up to the knight on the horse, and he looks at the knight’s lance, and he says, what is that you’re holding, and what’s it for? Now, it starts with the lance, this is really important, because that is the first thing in the grail procession that we’re gonna talk about in a minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the knight explains to him what the lance is and what it’s for. And then he looks at the shield, which is shaped like a dish, and he says, what is that, and what is it for? And he starts going through all of their stuff until he gets to their armor, their haubergs. And when he gets to their haubergs, the question he asks is not what is that and what is it for, but he says, how does that serve? Right, that’s his question about the knight’s gear, is how does it serve? And so this is the question that he’s asking when he’s faced with, you could say, the next thing on the ladder of ontological hierarchy. So he goes back to his mother, and he questions her, he learns for the first time about his father, who is this crippled knight who was pierced through the thighs who could not defend his lands or his fortune. So when King Uther Pendragon died, they lost everything. He had to be carried on a litter because he couldn’t ride his horse, all this stuff. She sees that she cannot dissuade him from his intent to leave home now and become a knight. And so Percival’s mother gives him a series of instructions. And she limits the fact that he’ll probably be killed because he doesn’t know how to fight, but she gives him a series of instructions. And the instructions that he gets at each level of the ontological hierarchy are very important. The first instruction he’s given is to give aid to any lady he meets. Okay, this is an important part of chivalry. And this comes with a provisional that he’s allowed to accept any token that he’s given from a lady up to a kiss. But if the lady tries to give you anything more than a kiss, Percival, you gotta say no. Yeah, it’s very delicately put in the poem. Second thing he’s supposed to do is to ask the name of any man who shows him hospitality. Because she says, and I quote, this is from the poem, it is by the name that we know the man. Now Percival still hasn’t been told his name. We don’t even know his name. He’s just called the young man at this point in the poem. So we don’t know him and he doesn’t know himself. The third thing he’s told is that he’s to stop and pray at a church or at any church or chapel that he comes across. And Percival doesn’t know what a church or a chapel is because he’s never seen one before. And so he’s told that this is a place, quote, filled with relics, treasures, holy, wherein they offer up the body of Jesus Christ. So already there’s this foreshadowing of what the grail is. All right, so keeping all of these things in mind, Percival doesn’t yet have an identity. He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t know how to act in the new world that he’s entered into. And this introduces a theme that we see repeat itself over and over again in the poem, which is that as Percival climbs the ontological hierarchy, he always lacks the information. We could say he lacks the manners that he needs to move in that particular rung of the ladder. And so we have to- I need you to say something that’s interesting though, that I just want to mention something that the structure that you’re presenting, it’s very powerful because even the idea that he’s in the wild is part of it. Like he’s definitely, everything there is there to show that he doesn’t have an identity. And so there are several stories where angels, like even in the gospel, when the apostles come to encounter the pagans, and then they’re like, oh, they bow down before them. It’s because you can understand that wherever level you are, if you receive something from above, it can appear to you at first as being the highest thing. That’s the problem of idolatry itself, is that something comes from above. And so you’re like, okay, that’s the thing that appears to me. It’s the highest thing. And so luckily for him, the knights were those that would render glory up, right? And say, no, it doesn’t stop us. Like maybe we, like in a way they were vehicles for him to go up the ladder, but they’re able to place themselves properly in a way as true angels and say, no, it’s like we’re just messengers for something higher that you need to access later, let’s say. And that can help you understand why the flattened cosmology that most of us are working with most of the time today, why A, it’s very difficult for somebody in that mindset to understand traditional Christian veneration, right? Because you see something like, you know, you’re the icon of the mother of God and you see us kissing it or hear the things that we’re saying about her. And you’re like, oh, you must think she’s the highest thing. But we don’t think she’s the highest thing. There’s something infinitely above her, right? But because when you have this flattened cosmology, you’re always liable to look at any bright thing that presents itself to your attention as this is the highest thing now, which is why it’s also, simultaneously it makes you maybe a little paranoid about idolatry in that form. It also makes you very liable to idolatry when like a really great athlete or a pastor you really love who’s a really good preacher or something like that, when that person presents themselves, right? Because there’s not room in your field of attention for a normal escalating levels, a normal hierarchy, yeah. So he has to rely on the advice that he gets from the guardian of each threshold, which is advice which he only ever sort of imperfectly puts into place. And you could say this sort of for us corresponds to the entrance into the church, both our entrance for the first time when catechesis begins, we take our first step up the mountain, right? And so we’re told that Percival is clothed by his mother in these garments of skin. They’re specifically said to be garments of skin. He’s dressed like a Welshman and he crosses a river to leave his home. Nice. And by the way, every time that he comes to a new, you could say like a new tier, a new rung in the ontological hierarchy, he crosses a river. So that’s just a very easy sort of symbolic key that you can look for in the story, okay? It’s a very, again, it’s a very beautifully structured story. And so garments are very important in the story and they signal the way that old and new things, identities are adopted or cast off. Their coverings, things that are used to both protect from danger, but also to confer identity. So in mystical terms, we could say we’re in the narthex now. So Percival’s first few encounters in the world of chivalry do not go smoothly. I’m not gonna like summarize the entire poem because it’s pretty long, but essentially he meets a maiden and instead of simply receiving her ring as a free gift, he misunderstands his mother’s instructions and he takes the ring, also a kiss, which actually causes a rift between her and her very jealous lover, who believes that she has now been unfaithful to him. And it’s a whole thing. She comes up later, she actually turns out to be Percival’s cousin, which is super awkward. Percival also meets a particularly troublesome knight known as the Red Knight. The Red Knight has stolen, guess what he’s stolen? I don’t remember what he’s stolen. He’s stolen a cup from Arthur’s court, Guinevere’s favorite cup. And as a result, the court of Arthur has been thrown into silence. Okay. Everyone is sad, there’s no more laughter, but it’s silence. And again, silence and laughter and speaking too much or being silent too much, those are like two of the main contrasts in this poem. Okay. So he’s stolen Arthur’s cup. And so, watch for some of these themes as they come up again. There’s a heavy silence laying on everyone except First-Year K, who is the King’s seneschal, sort of foster brother, and who in this particular poem is a pretty awful person. And so he laughs and disparages Percival because of Percival’s bad manners, which include riding his horse right into the King’s hall because he doesn’t know any better. And this sets up a rivalry between Percival and Kay, which is one of the subplots of the story. So when the Red Knight stole the King’s cup, he actually spilled or splashed the wine all over Queen Guinevere. So her honor has been insulted and none of Arthur’s knights are courageous enough to go out and challenge the Red Knight. And so Percival goes out and he sort of accidentally kills the Red Knight with his javelin, but he’s unable to remove his armor because he doesn’t understand how any of it works. So again, he has to ask somebody, how does this work? What is this for? How do we put this on? So somebody else comes along and helps him remove the armor and put it on himself. And this is the beginning of his chivalric career. So the beginning of Percival’s career as a knight actually begins with a rupture of communion around a stolen cup. And to get the cup back, he has to go out and become a knight. And so all of this is not without some regret. He is actually sad about, he doesn’t wanna get rid of the garments of skin that his mother gave him. He actually puts his armor on over them rather than discarding them. This is another move up the ontological ladder. And this is accompanied by, once again, the crossing of a river and the meeting of a new mentor. So you could say at this point, he’s gone as far as his mother’s knowledge can take him. He’s followed her instructions very imperfectly, but he somehow kind of stumbled himself a little higher up the mountain. He crosses this next river. And in this case, the new mentor is a guy by the name of Sir Gornemont, who is also sometimes in the poem, he’s just called the Worthy Man. The Worthy Man teaches Percival the ways of chivalry. He teaches him how to write, how to fight, how to use his weapons. Once again, with every weapon, the question of how does this serve or who does this serve comes up for each of the weapons. He also gives him a new set of instructions by which he is to live. And once again, he’s given new clothes, which finally, and he finally gives up the garments of skin that his mother gave him, which he’d still been wearing under the armor, and he’s clothed in new garments. So he’s also given a set of instructions. Some of these are overlaps of the instructions his mother gave him before, but there’s some new ones. So he’s told now he has to always show mercy to opponents who surrender. He’s told how to behave to maidens, which is just a repeat of the instructions his mother gave him. He’s told to go to church and pray, also a repeat. But the fourth thing that he’s told, and this is really critical for the story, is that he’s supposed to be taciturn. If he finds himself, because this whole time, he’s just been asking, what’s this, what’s this, what’s this? It’s like my four-year-old son, who just, like we’re out driving around doing errands yesterday, and he wants to know, why is that car different from this car? What are the speed bumps in the road for? Like, he just has all these questions about all these different things, right? Which is really fun for me, because I get to be all knowing for just like a brief moment. But he’s told, if you keep asking all these questions, people will think you’re a peasant. People will think you’re a child. You need to keep your mouth closed and just ask a servant later. Don’t keep asking all these questions. You’re embarrassing yourself, et cetera. So at this point, we see Percival beginning to mature. He makes fewer silly mistakes and seems to know how to behave himself. He’s been initiated into the chivalric world. He’s not just a pretender or an aspirant to it. He has, in other words, undergone a baptism of sorts, passing out of the narvex into the nave as he’s clothed in new garments and now ready and willing to face the challenges of this new level of reality in kind of an adult, mature way. And it’s interesting that he’s asked to stop asking questions because you could understand it. His position in the wild, his position at the bottom is basically a question. Who am I? What is this? What are all these things? He’s almost inhabiting a kind of feminine space where he’s asking questions. And so he gets initiated up and then at some point they’re saying, okay, so now you have to stop being that lower part. You kind of have to engage at a higher level. But I can already see how that it’s interesting that he would, the fact that he would not be able to recover that at the end is what would do him in or something. You’re getting ahead, but yes, you’re exactly right. That’s exactly the right intuition, right? So first of all, it has some adventures. Most importantly, he meets Blanche Fleur who is Sir Gournemont’s daughter, the worthy man’s daughter. He saves her, he falls in love with her. And in the middle of all this, he’s saving the town that she’s in from siege. And in the middle of all of this, which is one of what to me is actually one of the most interesting and kind of evocative episodes in the poem. And I just wanna put this out there to artists. I’ve actually written a poem about this particular scene because, and it’s importance to the rest of the story because I just find it incredibly evocative. If you are an artist, a painter, maybe an icon carver, and you’d like to like help me with an illustration of this. Maybe let’s talk about that. Because this is, and I’ve never seen an illustration of the scene, but it’s so, well, let me just, let me unpack this. You’ve been inspiring me to make a lot of- I know, I know, I know. Well, you gotta do this though. Well, maybe another one. You gotta do this one. So what happens is that he comes to this, this city, which is under siege and he delivers it. But while he’s there, he sees a minster, right? Like a monastery church. And he says, oh, I’ve been, it’s the first time he’s come across a church. But he says, I’ve been told I should always go into one and pray, right? And so he goes in. Because the town is under siege, there are no monks who are, there are no monks in the sanctuary. And he goes in and nothing is in good repair. We’re told that the walls are cracked and bare, that the towers are roofless, that the buildings are naked to the elements day and night. So you have this image of Percival walking into, he’s never been to a church before. He’s told he’s supposed to come here and worship God. And he walks in and there’s no one there to meet him. And the church is desolate, the walls are cracked. Everything’s crumbling around him. And so he’s just sort of sad and confused and he leaves. And this is gonna be important later on in the story. But to me, it’s just one of the most, if you wanted to sort of explain, I know there’s a famous classicist who once said something like modern people are barbarians living in the ruins of an advanced civilization. And to a certain extent, that image of showing up to a church and saying, I’m supposed to be here to worship God and to do a certain thing. And here I am. You and Bishop Aaron were getting into this in a lot of your recent conversation, about trying to recover cosmic Christianity. And I just, I had to tell you, this is nothing against Bishop Aaron, who is doing great work and God bless him. There were many times I wanted to jump in and say something. Like, do you ever feel that way? Like when you listen to other people’s podcast. Yes, I feel that way all the time. Man, could I just push on that a little bit or say something here? But that was a great conversation. And the… What is it that you wanted to say, Richard? Oh man, I’m trying to remember now. I’d have to go back and listen to it. There were a couple of little things where I was like, it wasn’t so much like disagreeing with him but I just wanted to add a little something. I mean, that’s how you know it was a good conversation. Like I felt it was engaging. I felt like I was there and I wanted to be like, oh, but… All right, so you’re saying that this experience of going into the church and finding an indiscriminate something that many people have today. Yeah, and there’s no one there to show you the way. There’s no one there to explain because all those people are… Honestly, it’s not their fault, right? In the case of this, all the monks and the nuns, it’s actually two churches. He goes into, because there’s a monastery and a nunnery in the same city. So he goes into the minister for each of them and finds them both in this state, right? And so all the monks and the nuns, they’re gone because they are… We’re told that they are frightened and wary. So these people are basically just trying to like survive. The city’s under siege. And so they’ve totally left the maintenance of the house of God to kind of look after themselves and try to hold whatever semblance of life they can together, right? And I don’t know, I just… Makes you think of a certain moment in our… Like say this moment right now. And I think, I mean, it’s funny, cause you’re right that even sometimes, even people who go in, who are interested in orthodoxy, sometimes that’s even their experience, right? They feel like, okay, this is not what I was told it was going to be like… 100%. Well, and I wanna say like, for those of us who have had this experience at some point in our lives, right? Of like entering the house of God and finding it kind of vacant and empty and crumbling and being like, what’s the big deal? Why is this really important, right? It’s not totally the fault of the people who are there. Like maybe you could say, well, I wish every one of these people had the martyr’s courage to kind of push on through. But even the stuff that you and Bishop Barham were talking about, this is part of what I wanted to say, is that like the kind of the denuding of a lot of the beauty of the Catholic tradition, right? A lot of those people who were pushing that stuff, I mean, there definitely was probably some malice on the part of some people. But I think a lot of people who went along with it, like the rank and file, just the normal prisoners, the people on the ground, they really thought this was gonna save them, right? They really thought this was gonna help them, right? And so they were already in kind of a, like modernity was already so ugly and so strong and so imposing. And it’s really easy to feel like we’re just under siege all the time. And when you’re in that mode, when you’re thinking in that way, you can let the really beautiful things go. And that’s that, anyway, so I just find this particular moment, which I’ve never heard anybody really talk about or illustrate, but I find this particular moment in the story really, really vivid. So, all right, so to push on a little bit. This is also the first time that he goes into a church. Yeah, first time he goes into a church. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense too, that as he’s coming from below, he would kind of encounter the brokenness and the fragmented part of what he’s moving into. Right, yeah. You can imagine somebody who like, as you’re coming up from below and you get into the Orthodox church and you’re like, oh, I’m here now, or the Roman Catholic church, or you’re like, oh, I’m here now and things are so beautiful. And then you realize that actually there’s also brokenness and scandal and there are bad bishops and there are acrimonious, parish council meetings. And easy people. And just like lots of people on the internet who all have an opinion about how you should be living your life, even though they’re not your spiritual father. You have all these different things. And the danger is to do what Percival did, which is he gets there and he’s like, and he walks out. What is this? Yeah, like, what is this? What’s happening? So at the end of all of this, before he marries Blanche Fleur, he decides he needs to return to his mother. And we get a little detail here. When he’d been leaving and crossing over the river, he looked back over the bridge and he saw his mother pass out, but he just kept going anyway. And so suddenly that recollection kind of stings him a little bit. He’s like, I should go see if mom is okay. And so he goes back to, so he leaves the town that he had saved. And by the way, we’re told that he leaves in a procession like unto the day of Ascension, which intends to bring his mother back so that she can take the veil. He wants to bring her back to this town he’s in so she can become a nun and he can be here with his girl and they can all kind of live together. And that people watching your channel probably know this, but that’s not a bad thing in the middle ages when you’re like, I would like my mom to become a nun. He’s not saying, he’s not saying I want to like put her away so she’s not in my way anymore. Like, this is a good thing. Like it’s, especially if you’re like a noble lady and then you become a nun, you’re usually in charge of the monastery. So it’s like, in other words, he wants his mom to be looked after and comfortable and to live this life of beauty and rest now that he’s delivered the city from siege. But we’re told that this is like the feast of Ascension, which I think just brings back to mind that icon, the fresco of the Virgin of the Pyrenees, right? With the mother at the center, right? In this image of Ascension that we talked about last time. And there seems to be echoes of that here. And of course, there are a lot of scholars who think that that’s one of the main origins for Chrétien when he’s writing his romance. So, you know, just a nice image there. But Percival can’t go home again, or at least he can’t go home again easily, not the same way that he left. So he comes to a third river. And of course, the thing is that his house is on the, his home is on the other side of the third river. So it’s not totally clear. Is the third river a different river or is it the first one again, right? This is the third river, the third liminal moment in the story. But this time Percival can’t see a way to cross. So he meets a man fishing in the river. There’s no bridge, but he meets a man fishing in the river who tells him go up the road where he’s gonna find lodging and a way across the river. This turns out to be the castle of the Fisher King. And this is where the real adventure of the Grail begins. So the Fisher King sits on a bed in the middle of his castle. He has some kind of a wound in his loins as a result of which he cannot get up from his bed, which is exactly the case for Percival’s father. And in fact, we find out at the end of Percival’s story that the Fisher King is his mother’s brother. So he’s Percival’s uncle. And the middle ages to be a maternal uncle is as close or in some cases actually closer than being a father. Because if somebody is your sister’s son, he can’t legally inherit anything that you have. So he’s got no reason to kill you to take your stuff. And he’s got no reason to… And so what it means is like, there’s usually a very strong bond of love because it’s like a strong bond of loyalty without threat of usurpation, you could say. So that’s who the Fisher King is, but Percival doesn’t know that yet. And of course, the Fisher King is the same wound as Percival’s father. So it’s like a deliberate kind of recapitulation. So while he’s in the Fisher King’s castle, he sees a strange procession. They’re sitting at the table, they’re eating, and the door opens and in comes first a squire bearing a lance, the tip of which is not merely bloodied, but actually bleeding, right? Because of course, when you stab Jesus, Jesus wounds the lance, right? And so the tip of the spear is not merely bloodied, but it’s bleeding. And Percival wants to ask, what’s the purpose of the lance? He wants to ask the question that he had asked the knights when he first met them, which is, how does it serve? What’s it serving? Who’s it serving? And this is what Percival does when he encounters something new beyond the knowledge that he has from his previous identity, something beyond the tier of the ontological ladder, which he’s used to inhabiting. He wants to ask, what’s it for? How does it work? And then just as he’s about to ask, he thinks back to the advice that the worthy man gave him, which is, don’t ask too many questions. People will think you’re a peasant. People will think you’re a child. So he doesn’t ask and the procession continues. And there are two more young men come out bearing tapers and candelabra, a total of 10 candles. And they’re followed by a virgin, a young maiden, who bears in her hands a grail, which is a wide, shallow covered dish, we’re told large enough to serve a pike or a lamprey. In other words, it’s a very large dish intended for serving fish, which is an obvious Eucharistic symbol as anyone in the middle ages would have known. Yeah. Percival is unaware of its contents though, because it’s covered. But the most striking thing about the grail is that it shines brightly with its own light, just like the grail that the Virgin holds in the image of the Pyrenees. Shines brightly with its own light, so brightly that a far out shines the large candelabra which preceded it. And once again, Percival is just dying to know what is all of this about. The grail is clearly special, it’s holy, it’s valuable, but there’s no clear indication as to why the procession is happening or why it’s happening now. So the question he wants to ask is, how does this serve? Who is it serving? Percival wants to know, but again, he thinks back to the worthy man’s advice and he doesn’t ask. And once again, as the table before him is being filled with these unimaginable delicacies, the grail passes before him again, the lance, the whole procession, and once again, he wants to ask the question, who’s it serve? Once again, he keeps his mouth shut. And by the way, he’s also not observed any of the other pieces of advice he was given. He doesn’t ask the name of the man who shows him hospitality. If he did, he’d find out it was his uncle. If he’d asked that, a great deal of trouble would have been saved. So he decides to wait until the next morning and ask the servants. But when he awakens the next morning, the castle is totally empty and the chance to ask the question has been lost. Yeah. So the very next person that he meets is the maiden whose ring he stole back at the beginning of the story and whose life he unintentionally ruined. She tells him the story of the fisher king, that he was a king, a noble, wounded by battle, in battle, by a lance, which pierced him through both of his thighs, which is the same story he was told about his father. She excitedly questions Percival because she assumes that he has asked the question, who, how serves the grail, whom does it serve? And when she finds out that he is not asked, she becomes distraught. She mocks Percival, and it is this moment is when Percival’s true name is revealed. Which he has not known up to this point. Mm-hmm. Of course, his mother had once told him, by a name, you will know a man. And now for the first time, Percival comes to real self-knowledge, but it’s a deeply painful self-knowledge. So if we wanna follow our liturgical reading of the story, we see this third river, which may or may not be the first river, kind of symbolizes the third and the final barrier to Percival’s ascent up the mountain. It’s the veil drawn over the Holy of Holies. It’s the rude screen, the iconostasis, which seems to bar the way to the mysteries. And given the dependency of grail legends, like I said, on the divine liturgy, the rituals of the Christian East, I don’t think it’s surprising here that the grail procession, as many, many scholars have noted, is basically identical to the great entrance. Which is when the patents and the chalice are brought out, accompanied by tapers and incense. And if there are enough clergy serving, one of them will also carry a knife. A spear. Yeah, which we call the spear or the lance, which is used to divide the body of Christ. Yeah, which is something I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know that- Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actual utensil that is used to cut the, that is actually used in the liturgy to pierce the bread is definitely related to the lance itself. It’s related to the lance, it’s the spear, right? So you have silence and speech and laughter all playing a crucial role in this tale, in a lot of ways I didn’t have time to get into. As they do in most Arthurian stories, actually. You need to link back to your Merlin story that you told like two years ago, because I think it’s time that people got that back in their consciousness now. Now that we’ve seen a lot of things happen over the last two years, it would be good to remind people of that story. So here’s the thing, there’s a time to keep silent before a mystery, but this is not the kind of silence which Percival has been enjoying to practice by the worthy man. His silence might be characterized by the old adage often repeated to me by my father, because I’m a talkative person, right? That light is faster than sound, that’s why everybody looks smart until they open their mouth. So this is the silence of somebody who has been embarrassed before, somebody who’s looked foolish, looked childish before, and has spent the rest of their life from that moment on trying to prove that they should be taken seriously. There’s lots of examples of this happening in the poem, people can go and read for themselves. But the source of Percival’s childishness and his naivete is his lack of a father, right? Somebody who could have taught him the use of arms, and most importantly, would have given him his true name, conferring identity upon him. And in the castle of the Fisher King, Percival is really close to healing this wound. All he has to do is to ask the right question. Yeah, but the question is basically, what is it and what’s its reason? It’s like, it’s basically the ontological question. Yeah, right, right, which is the fundamental question that Percival asked when he was down here. Yeah, that’s what makes you go up the ontological hierarchy in the first place, right? You’re amongst a bunch of stuff, and then you ask, you kind of see the stuff coming together, and then you ask, oh, what is it, what is it for? And once you do that, then you can jump up a level, right? That’s how you, that’s actually, even in the most immediate way, that’s how we move from levels of reality. To use the basic example that everybody mocks me for using all the time now, it’s like the same question with like, you have a bunch of parts of something, like parts of a chair, and then you have to ask, what is this? When you see them coming together, what is it for? And once you know that it’s for sitting on, then you’ve jumped up a level, like you’ve actually gone up a level in an ontological hierarchy. Of course, it’s not the same as all the way up to the grail, but you can understand this as an image of how reality works and how things come together and how they kind of move up into reality. And that in a way, you can see that when you go up, you have to, you kind of have to assume the level that you are, and you have to stop asking the question at first, only when you reach the next level that you have to start asking questions again. But if you ask questions when you’re, when you think about it, like if you master something, you have to master it and you have to live it. If you keep asking questions, you’re not mastering it. But when you reach the next level, then you have to be willing or capable of asking questions again. But in this story, it seems like it’s like a cycle where he seems to, like it says, if he comes back home, but now his home is like a higher version of his home, we could say, but he’s just not totally able to get there. Like you said, maybe because he lacks a father, he doesn’t have that identity confirmed upon him. He’s not capable of asking the right question to kind of connect with his, because it’s clear that his uncle, his father, it’s related. It’s trying to get you to see that there’s something pretty much the same thing is going on. And the mystery that he saw at the beginning with the different objects that he asked about is the same mystery now he’s seeing, but at a higher level and now he can’t pierce it. So why do you say that it’s a success? So if he asked this question, he’s told, the Fisher King would have been healed. Instead, ruin comes upon his family. His mother has died. The young maiden whose life is ruined turns out to be his cousin. The land suffers as a result. So in divine liturgy, the very last thing that we say before communion begins to the laity, right, is the holy things are for the holy. Yeah. It’s a challenge. It’s a warning. It’s a statement about who these mysteries are for. They are for those who put on Christ. We say one is holy. One is Lord Jesus Christ, right? Who are these for? These are for little children. They’re for people who put on Christ. They’re for those who have come to be fed and not just to be fed, but we don’t. In our church, we don’t pick up the elements and feed ourselves. We are fed with a spoon, right? I have four children. I’ve got another kid on the way in January, right? Like I fed lots and lots of kids with spoons, right? It’s messy sometimes, but it’s necessary, right? And so to receive communion is self-knowledge. It’s the ultimate. It’s like the only real self-knowledge, right? It’s to find yourself in Christ. It heals the wound of our father, Adam, and it bestows upon us a name that no man knows, is what St. John says. Excommunication, though, is also a kind of self-knowledge, right? It’s anyone who has experienced the pain of ever being denied communion, or either as a catechumen, you know, catechumens depart, right? Chase you out of the church. Or a penitent knows this really well. So at this first time, and here’s the thing people always miss, is that he gets a second chance, okay? But at this first time, Percival fails to achieve the grail. He fails to enter into the healing of communion because he can’t come to it as that child. Yeah, he can’t make himself small again at the level where he is so that he can receive. So there’s a lot that happens at this point in the story. He has some more adventures, which sort of culminate in him writing the wrong to his cousin, right? So he sort of solves all of that problem. And the narrative passes on to some of Arthur’s Knights, in particular, Gawain. I’m not even gonna talk about that stuff in the story today. When we meet Percival again, when we meet Percival again, we find him a lost and broken man. He spent the last five years wandering in the waste. Looking for the lance and for the grail. He’s looking for healing and communion. And he can’t find his way. He has forgotten everything, including God. He’s forgotten God. He’s forgotten the laws of chivalry. He’s even forgotten his own name. And when next we meet him, Percival has spent these last five years pursuing one adventure after another, never stopping at a chapel to pray, we’re told. Never paying attention to the favor or the needs of ladies, we’re told. In short, pursuing deeds of arms, but never attending to the things that either his mother or the worthy man had instructed him to do. And this culminates one day, he’s riding along and he sees three unarmed knights, along with some ladies walking through the woods. And they stop him and they say, sir, don’t you know it’s unlawful to wear arms on this day? And he says, what’s today? What’s special about today? And they said, this is Good Friday. This is the day on which our Lord Jesus died. You’re not supposed to go armed today. He said, well, I don’t know who Jesus is and I don’t know what Good Friday is. And so they tell him, they tell him, well, go back through the woods that direction. We’ve tied knots on the ends of branches to show you the way. And you’ll find a hermitage. You can go into that hermitage and ask the hermit and he will tell you what to do. So Percival follows his instructions. He follows the knots on the branches until he comes to the hermitage and he meets the hermit. And he starts telling the hermit his whole story and asking, what’s this all about? And what the hermit does is he begins by catechizing Percival. He catechizes him by telling him and we get the whole thing. He explains the entire creed to Percival, which had been taught to Percival, but he’d never been taught what it meant. So he catechizes Percival and then he tells Percival who he is. He tells him his name. He tells him who his father was. And then he reveals the fact that he is also Percival’s uncle. With the hermit? The hermit. Is a fisher king. He’s, I’ll be a little apophatic here and say what the poem says, which is the fisher king is Percival’s uncle and the hermit is Percival’s uncle. Are they the same person? Yeah. So hold on. I was trying to pull up this passage because it’s really, really beautiful. The worthy man, which by the way, the hermit is also called the worthy man. So he’s like every mentor. Right, yeah, all joined together. Yeah. Misfortune has fallen you of a sin for which you are ignorant. And he finds out the reason that he failed to ask the question was because he left his mother when she died. And so he talks about all of this and he says, here’s what he says, here’s what he says. Okay. Foolish were you not to learn who was served from the bowl. The man who is served from it was my brother. So he’s not the fisher king, but he’s kind of the fisher king. My sister and his was your mother. As for that rich fisher king, he is, I believe, the son of the king who was himself served from the bowl. So talking about the bowl, what’s in the bowl? He asked what’s in the bowl. And he’s told, what is in the bowl is not a salmon or a pike or a lamprey, but rather a single sacred wafer. Carried to him in the bowl, we know he sustains and nourishes his life. Such a holy object is in the bowl and so pure in spirit is he himself that in this life, he requires no further nourishment than the host that comes from the bowl. So there’s all kinds of stuff going on here, but at the end of it all, he catechizes Percival. And at the end of catechism, he says, now that he’s told him who he is and he’s told him why bad things have happened to him, and he’s told him what the grail was and what its purpose was, gets the end of the poem. And here’s what we’re told. He says, stay with me for the next three days and eat what I eat. Well, you have to read between the lines here. It’s good Friday. Three days from now is Easter. Eat what the hermit eats. In other words, fast with me. So Percival- He’s basically saying you will get what you will get from the grail. Yeah. So Percival is catechized, he fasts, and we’re told that on Easter day, thus Percival came to know that God was crucified and died on the Friday. And on Easter, Percival received communion with a pure heart. And then we’re told here, the tale says, no more of Percival. Okay, you’ve totally convinced me that Percival- That’s awesome. That’s the end of his story. Percival finds the grail. So he finds the grail, but how does he find the grail? He has to come to it broken. He has to come to it like just totally empty to who he is and to come again as a little child and to sort of say, who am I? Why am I here? What is this thing? Right? And then he’s catechized and then he fasts. And we’re actually told he puts on the hair shirt that the hermit is wearing. You know, again, it’s a change of garment, a change of identity. Well, he puts back the hair shirt from the beginning, but now it’s a penitential- Exactly. Accent. It’s the opposite of the hair shirt received from Adam and Eve in a way. So isn’t that interesting that the garment of skin become like at the beginning, it just sort of becomes this identity of death. But then later when you put it, you can take that death on yourself. And so by remembering your death, it becomes transformed into life. That’s amazing. I mean, it’s amazing also that it’s like, he discovers that the grail is not the one, in a way, is not the one cup. Well, that’s the thing. It’s not the cup that he saw in the castle, basically. Yeah. In this poem, it’s not. In this poem, the grail is not the idea of the cup of the last supper that comes from Brodwiboran, which is later. And that’s definitely the most successful version. But in this, it’s a dish that holds the Eucharistic host. And so when we’re told that, and then literally a page later we’re told, on Easter, Percival received communion with a pure heart and here the tale says no more of Percival. Like you have to look at that and say, he made it. He made it, you guys. He found it. He discovered his identity. He’s discovered who he is. And this idea, and one of the things you have to always keep in mind when you’re reading medieval literature is that man is a microcosm. So by healing Percival, all these other people and things that he’s interacted with, which in the story are basically sort of externalizations of his lack of identity, right? And his attempt to sort of climb the ontological ladder. All that stuff is actually fulfilled and healed, right? And that’s why the mentor is like, the mentor feeds and clothes him. So it’s the mentor, you know, the hermit feeds and clothes him, becomes his mother. He’s referred to as the worthy man, right? So he becomes, you know, the worthy man. But he’s also the brother of the fisher king. So he becomes, you know, so he’s like every sort of threshold. Combination of all the thresholds, yeah. Right, are sort of gathered up in him. So there’s a- What’s super interesting, like what really fascinates me about what you’re saying is also if what you’re saying is real, like if you’re framing it properly, it also shows the manner in which the, like the esotericists, like the kind of theosophists and the occultists, they were always looking for another mystery. Like they had the sense in which the Christian mystery was not enough. And they were looking for these other mysteries. And a lot of the esoteric stuff that went around the grail was this idea that there is this other initiation, there’s this other mystery that we can access that is hard and that it’s hidden, but you can see that in, at least in Percival, at least in this version, it leads up to communion as being the highest mystery, as being that which culminates his whole life into this moment where, because it also, there is a sense in which while he’s going around, he doesn’t know who Christ is. But his mom says, his mother says to go into a church, but he hasn’t been properly catechized. He doesn’t understand the mystery of Christ. And so he kind of all culminates into this last moment. And we’re told, I mean, lots of beautiful little details here at the end, right? When Percival first comes to the, starts walking down the path. And I would love to know if you have a take on the knotted tree branches that line the path. Yeah. It’s mentioned multiple times and I still don’t totally understand. Like what’s the significance of that? Well, you can understand it, you can understand it the way you understand a prayer row. Right, so you have to understand like, that’s so obvious once you say it, I’m like, oh gosh, it’s a, well, a prayer rope, a rosary. Like it’s a- Yeah, so prayer ropes and rosaries are like little worlds that connect, that are connected together, right? So it’s like you move from world to world. But also like a progression. Right, you progress up a hierarchy and then you have higher steps and then you keep moving. Yeah, and so what happens as he moves along, we’re told that as he walks past the knots, he felt his very heart sighing because he knew that he’d sinned against God and he was sorry. And in tears, he made his way towards the forest. And when he reached the hermitage, he dismounted and disarmed. So disarmed means he took all of his armor off. Yeah. Right. Ties his horse to a tree and he enters the hermit’s dwelling. And it says, in that small chapel, he found the hermit and a priest and a young cleric. This is the truth, who were beginning the service, the sweetest and most beautiful that may be said in Holy church. So he shows up at the beginning of mass. Right. Yeah. He shows up at the beginning of mass, which is what? That’s the grail procession. Right? So he shows up at the chapel and it’s happening again. And this time he falls to his knees and the hermit sees him weeping and comes over to him. And he says, and Percival wants to receive communion. And the hermit tells him, you have to make your confession first before you receive communion. Right? And so that’s what initiates the conversation between them, the exchange, Percival’s reclaiming of identity. It’s through his act of confession, which becomes a repetition of his catechesis and his repentance culminates in fasting, praying, receiving communion. So it’s, I mean, there’s all these just really beautiful details in here. And there’s a bunch of stuff in the story that I haven’t even talked about, but there’s a lot of things I still haven’t really understood, though they seem to be symbolically significant. Like there’s an intuition that there’s something there, but it’s not clear what. But also some of it is just, some of it is just like every detail in this poem is significant. And to try and summarize it and explain like my overarching thesis about it is very difficult if you keep getting hung up on all the granular levels. Like one of the things that comes up over and over again in this poem is the symbolism of the cloak. People have cloaks that they put on, that they take off, that they give to other people at certain times, right? Which is really interesting. So. It certainly had to do with the garment of skin and then the different clothing that he has at different levels and the armor also. It probably is all related. You have to look at in what condition, in what moment do they remove the cloak and what does it imply? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s just a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff in this story. And of course there’s a whole Gawain portion of this. So what’s interesting is that Gawain in this poem, and that’s the part of the poem that’s not finished, Gawain in this poem isn’t looking for the grail, he’s specifically looking for the lance. So if I had to sort of like fanfic this up a little bit and I feel like I’m justified in doing so because everyone in the middle ages did, I would not have Gawain continue searching for the grail. I would have him find the lance. And so you’d have like sort of the Percival finds the grail, Gawain finds the lance. And that’s how I would end the romance. That makes sense. Like you’re ready to, but it makes sense, especially if the idea that Percival does indeed find the grail. So the Gawain would find something equivalent to the lance, but let’s say in terms of maybe something about the crucifixion or something in that. Yeah. So that might be a fun project to take up one of these days is to try to do my own, they’re called the continuations. I could do my own. The definitive continuation. Definitive continuation, right. So yeah, all that to say whether or not you think Percival found the grail, he found the grail. He did. He found the grail. Because he received communion. There’s no doubt, exactly. So. All right, so Richard Rowland revolutionizing, but not just revolutionizing, but just proving to all the modern scholars that you know, continue what he was doing. And yeah, you know, for sure Percival found the grail. And so, yeah, so thanks. We will continue on. There’s no stopping this conversation. So is there something you wanted to tell us, tell everybody before we let them go? I don’t know when this will drop, but we’re currently in the Advent season or the Nativity Fest, if you’re Orthodox Christian. I would just tell everyone, keep your eyes open and your ears open right now. There’s a, this is, I like to say crazy things on other people’s podcasts, because then like if they choose not to edit it out, that’s their fault. So there’s this, there’s this, there’s this tradition, like a sort of like a folk superstition that on Christmas Eve, you know, and this is also true. This is the whole idea of like Halloween and other, like the night before, like Good Friday as well. Like the night before a really holy day, right? Is a day when like the barriers between worlds are like really thin and stuff can slip through and bad things could happen, but also good things could happen. And what I would just say is be really attentive during the season and pay attention because things are going to, and I think especially if you’re a Western person, I think Christmas, I mean, I think we all know Christmas is bigger than Easter in the West. It just is, right? Whether or not that should be the case. And in a certain way, I think like there’s a particular Western genius to the way that we celebrate Christmas. Like some of those old Christmas carols, and I’ve been posting a bunch of them on Facebook, like those things are a symbolic gold mine. And I don’t think you can really beat them. Yeah, and the Christmas tree is so awesome. You can’t, not a lot of stuff. Yeah, no, we have a, there’s a particular Western genius for celebrating Christmas. And what I would say is just be really attentive to the things that are happening, the patterns that are manifesting this season. And of course, at the end of it all, look for Christ. So. All right, thanks Richard. And so, yeah, I think that’s true. We probably will drop this just before Christmas. So I wish you, wish all of you Merry Christmas as well. And we’ll see you in the new year. This episode is part of a series of discussions I’ve had with Richard Roland on universal history. You can find a list of all these episodes on my YouTube channel, or you can find them also in my podcast stream from the symbolic world on your different podcast platforms. Make sure to check out Richard’s second podcast, which he hosts in collaboration with Father Andrew Damick, called Amon Sul, which looks at the relationship between Tolkien and orthodoxy. This podcast has also inspired in me some ideas for creating some images, whether it be the king under the mountain, whether it be the grail or beautiful Ethiopian traditions. I’ve created some products which you can find on my store, the symbolicworld.store, and there will probably be more of those to come very soon. So stay tuned. This conversation is ongoing, and there is still very much to explore in the universal history.