This is another in the series of stories written by my Mom, Babs Dahlman. This was originally written for “UnQuotes”, a group of Cincinnati Women who got together to share papers and research from the 1960’s through the 2000’s. This is Mom’s writings, and I have only very gently edited it (Marty Dahlman).
Whilst in England last August, I heard a most intriguing story of a recent search for the Holy Grail. It so intrigues me, that since I have spent many hours reading and studying about the Holy Grail. I will eventually come back to the fascinating story that I heard, but first, perhaps, I should try and define the Holy Grail.
The Holy Grail is represented invariably as the Vessel in which Christ celebrated the Last Supper. It is, therefore, a Passover or Sacramental Vessel, and according to the Legend, its next use was to receive the blood from the wounds of Christ when his body was taken down from the Cross. The Vessel then supposedly was carried westward in safe guardianship to Britain and there remained under successive Keepers.
In the days of King Arthur, Arthur assumed the responsibility of carrying on the Legend, with which object he brought about the Legend of the Round Table and the flower of Arthurian chivalry. Percival, Lancelot, Galahad and many others set out to find the Sacred Vessel. Sir Galahad was the noblest and the most virtuous knight in the Legend of King Arthur’s Round Table.
There was one seat at the Round Table which was reserved for the knight so pure that he would someday find the Holy Grail. The seat was called Seat Perilous. One day, Sir Galahad’s name appeared on the seat, and from that time on he occupied that seat. He saw a vision of the Grail. The Grail appeared suspended in the air and covered with a cloth. Stirred by the vision, he went on a search for the Holy Grail and legend has it that he eventually found it. Sir Lancelot also searched for it, but being morally imperfect, did not find it.
From a very early age, I have always been fascinated by the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, and whenever I go to England, I always make a pilgrimage to a town called Glastonbury where, supposedly, Arthur and Guinevere are buried. There is something about Glastonbury!
Stand before the place of the High Altar of the Benedictine Abbey Ruins, beneath which are the reputed graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, and you feel the romantic stories of the Round Table must be true. Pause on the site of St. Mary’s Chapel and you stand where history claims the first Christian Church was built in England, a wattle and daub shed, maybe, but none-the-less the ground is holy. Enter the vast and once ornate Abbot’s kitchen, with its enormous chimneys and ornamental roof lantern and it is not difficult to imagine the medieval brothers busy at their chores.
Not too far from the Abbey is a garden called the Garden of the Chalice Well. The garden is terraced on rising ground and the trees and flowering shrubs cluster around the Chalice Well Head. The Well is fed by a spring which rises from the Chalice Hill. Legend cites this hill as the place where Joseph of Arimathea buried the Cup used at the Last Supper, which he had carried with him to Britain. Sailing up the Bristol Channel, his small boat grounded on the slopes of the hill and he thrust his staff, giving birth to the Flowering Thorn. Water flows from the spring at a rate of 1,000 gallons an hour, at a constant temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and has never been known to fail. This is no ordinary water, however, for from the 14th Century until today, healings are claimed to have been due to its influence and it is still used for baptisms.
Down half a dozen steps from the pathway through the garden is a paved courtyard. Here, the water falls over the stone into a channel reddened by its passage, and thence into a shallow bath. While scientists attribute the colour of the water to its chalybeate qualities, being rich in iron, religious mystics will see herein a symbol of the Chalice presence. Hence, its alternative name of the Blood Spring.
Three hills can be seen from the garden – Chalice Hill, Tor Hill and Weary All Hill. The garden lies in the lee of the Tor, on which stands the ruined tower built on the site of an ancient chapel to St. Michael. The garden itself is laid out over the place where it is believed Joseph had his hermitage of twelve huts.
Legend preserves the story of Joseph and the sacred Chalice, and romance recalls the age old quest for the Holy Grail. The Sacred Thorn, originally chopped off by a Cromwellian soldier, continues to bloom each winter from a cutting planted in the Abbey Grounds. In fact, every Christmas a spray is cut from the Holy Thorn and placed on the royal breakfast tray for the Queen and the Queen Mother on Christmas morning. The only indigenous shrub which resembles the thorn bush grown in Syria, but many slips have been taken from the Glastonbury Thorn and cultivated in English gardens.
History is in this place. Legend flourishes here. Its romance has covered many a page. All being in antiquity and much is beyond mortal proof. But, there is something about Glastonbury.
And so, I come to the modern day search for the Holy Grail. Whilst in England this summer, I met an old friend and he told me of his quest to find the Holy Grail. Unlike King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, his quest was not fruitless. For, after many miles and much research, he bicycled down a twisting valley to an Edwardian house in an English village, where in a glass topped case lies the remains of an ancient olive-wood cup that many thousands of people firmly believe is the Chalice of the Last Supper, and therefore, Christianity’s most sacred relic. Could it possibly be genuine? It is easy to be sceptical, but the cup has a curious history, and before you judge its authenticity, it is well to go back to the legend entwined in Tennyson’s lines in the “Idylls of the King”:
The Cup the Cup itself from which our Lord
Drank at the Last Supper with his own.
This from the blessed land of Aramat
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering over Moriah – the good saint
Arimatheaen Joseph, journeying, brought to
Glastonbury.
Where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord
And there awhile it bode, and if a man
Could see or touch it, he was healed at once
By faith of all his ills.
Probably the older of England’s oral traditions – a story passed by word of mouth through generations – is that the Cup used by Christ at the Last Supper on the eve of his crucifixion was brought to this country by Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew, a friend of Jesus, who helped to bury Jesus in the rock-hewn tomb. Joseph was engaged in the tin trade which flourished between Palestine and Cornwall in the A.D.
As I have already said, legend says that he sailed up the Bristol Channel until his small boat bumped to a stop on rising ground among the meres of Somerset, at a place now called Glastonbury, but which was once an island known as Avalon. He buried the cup there under a spring, and a wattle and daub place of worship was built on the site, which became the first Christian Church of Britain.
When Joseph died, he pledged his son, Josephus, to guard the secret hiding place of the Holy Grail, as the sacred chalice came to be called. This he must have done, if the story is to be given any credence at all, for five centuries later, the stalwart figure of Arthur strode into the legend and his court of chivalrous knights were sworn to defend the Holy Grail, though none but Sir Galahad ever claimed to have seen it.
King Arthur was mortally wounded after a battle in the year 542, and was buried with his Queen Guinevere at Avalon. In 1190, after the monks had established a monastery on the site of the original wooden church, a stone slab was unearthed at Glastonbury with a Latin inscription stating, “Here lies buried the famed King Arthur in the isle of Avalon.” Later, workmen unearthed an early Celtic coffin – a hallowed out oak tree trunk – containing the bones of a man of giant stature with the remains of a woman at his feet.
Controversy continues to rage at this finding, over the belief that Joseph of Arimathea was also buried there. But a reliable document in the English College at Rome, written by William Good who was born in Glastonbury in 1527, states that the monks never knew for certain the place of this Joseph’s burying. They said the body was hidden most carefully and that when it should be found the whole world would wend their way thither on account of the miracles worked there. Another thing William Good said was that he remembered seeing a stone cross, with a bronze plate on which was carved an inscription relating that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain forty years after Christ’s Passion with eleven or twelve companions, and that he was allowed by Ariviragus the King to dwell at Glastonbury which was then Avalon in a simple and solitary life.
So there is some documentary evidence to support the oral tradition, but he made no mention of a wooden chalice. Nothing further is known of the Holy Grail itself until the year 1539 when Glastonbury Abbey became a victim of Henry the VIII’s anti-monastic power. The glorious building was despoiled at the brutal hands of the King’s men. Afraid for the safety of the ancient relic, Abbot Richard Whiting entrusted the sacred Cup into the hands of his Prior and six monks who were told to flee into the mountains of Wales and deliver it into the care of the Cistercian monks at Strata Florida, a medieval abbey situated in Cardiganshire.
As the monks sped northwards and westwards with the Cup, Henry’s soldiers were dragging poor Abbot Whiting on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor where he was publicly hanged for allowing his brethren to escape with the treasured relic.
On their way to Wales, the brothers rested for a time, according to tradition, at a tiny hamlet called Ozleworth, set among the Cotswold Hills above Wootton under Edge in the Gloucestershire country. There they placed the wooden cup in a niche in the Church of St. Nicholas, a medieval chapel forming part of Ozleworth Park, now owned by Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Ferguson.
This was verified by a former rector of the church, the Reverend George Worthing, who said that when the Abbey at Glastonbury was threatened, the monks were sent out to hide the treasures, including a wooden chalice which was probably kept in a niche in the tower.
Although the legend speaks of no other place, it seems likely that the monks would have crossed the River Severn by way of Gloucester, where the Benedictines had an Abbey before Henry’s troops confiscated it.
Once over the river, the monks pressed deeper into the Black Mountains until they arrived at Strata Florida, fifteen miles from Aberystwyth on the coast of the Irish Sea. The monks were given sanctuary and were able to hide their treasure for a few years, but Henry’s men were still searching for them, and in due course they approached the Cistercian monastery.
The monks, ever faithful to their promise to protect the Holy Grail with their lives, were forced to flee again. They scattered into the countryside and found refuge with an old Welsh landed family, the Powells, Lord of the Manor of Nanteos, a small village in the Paith Valley, three miles from Aberystwyth. The monks remained there in hiding and safety until the end of their days.
As the last of them lay dying, he handed the Cup to the head of the family, exacting a deathbed promise that the Powells would be faithful custodians of the Holy Grail until such time as the Church shall claim her own.
And so, the Cup remained safely in their hands throughout the years. After the present Nanteos Mansion was built in 1739, the Cup was occasionally shown to distinguished visitors, such as the poet, A. C. Swinburne, and the famous composer Richard Wagner, who during his stay at Nanteos, is believed to have had the inspiration for his opera, “Parsifal”, published in 1882, a year before he died. The opera tells the story of Sir Parsifal, a holy knight of the Round Table who helped to save the Holy Grail.
In the 400 years the Cup was at Nanteos, it has been a source of wonder to the country folk around, and talks of miraculous cures abound. Some have been documented in notes left by the villagers which still are with the cup today.
Most of the cures were dated in mid-Victorian times, but others quite recently, but so few people know of the Cup’s existence and of its whereabouts – a secret all who are pledged to keep.
A family tree in the hall of the Nanteos mansion traces the Powells from the 13th century to the year 1951, when the last of the line died at age 89.
There was litigation among distant relatives over the inheritance of Nanteos and while this action was being contested in the courts, the olive-wood Cup was removed secretly to the vaults of the bank until Mr. Powell’s cousin, Eliz Mirylees, inherited the estate. The Cup was once again in the care of the Powell family who guard it today. In 1967 they sold Nanteos Mansion to the Bliss family and moved, taking the Cup with them – somewhere in England.
It is there after a long search that my friend traced it. Major James Mirylees, a devout churchman, had died and his wife was too ill to appear when my friend called at the family home. One of the three daughters, Clementine, kindly admitted him to see the relic.
It is stored in a small wooden case the size of a shoe box with a sliding glass lid. Approximately five inches in diameter and three inches deep, about the size of a grapefruit bowl, but little more than half of the original Cup remains. Over the centuries, cure seekers or over-zealous pilgrims have nibbled away at the rim as they drank water from the Cup.
That is why the present owner has so far refused to allow a further fragment to be removed for carbon dating tests which could prove once and for all whether it is 2000 years old. For some, proof in not necessary.
Only one expert on Palestinian archeology has ever see the Nanteos Cup. That was the late Sir Charles Marston in 1938. He would not dismiss the possibility that it was indeed the Holy Grail, but he refused to pronounce on it with any degree of surety for or against. Since then, the cup has melted further and further into the misty backgrounds of the countryside. First in Wales, and now in England, as the Mirylees family has tried to find peace from the constant stream of people who, until a few years ago, had bombarded them with heart rending pleas for water from the Cup.
The family was planning to move again to cover their tracks from Nanteos. Yet, they have never denied anyone the right to see the cup, once the searcher discovered its whereabouts.
The Cup itself is no grand chalice, rimmed with gold and rubies, but a simple wooden drinking vessel. As such, it seems wholly credible that it could be the kind of plain bowl that Christ would have used for his Last Supper on earth, rather than the grand silver goblet depicted by artists centuries ago.
No one will know for certain if it really is the Holy Grail, but the many letters testifying to its healing powers make it an object of reverence as well as deep mystery.
Facts have placed it back as far as Glastonbury – only Faith can take it beyond.
The Holy Grail inspired some of the finest poetry of the Middle Ages. European poets established the basic parts of the Holy Grail story between about 1180 and 1240. These poets may have adapted the legend from the tale told much earlier by pagan Celtic people. The Celtic story described a magic cup that provided food and drink for anyone who used it.
Chretian de Troyes, a French poet, wrote an unfinished poem about the Grail that later writers completed. Chretian’s became the best known of the Grail stories. His Percival, called “Tale of the Grail” is the earliest known version of the legend.
Wolfram van Eschenbach of Germany wrote an important account of the legend based on at least part of Chretian de Troyes. His rhymed “Parzival” is considered a masterpiece of medieval literature.
Sir Thomas Mallory wrote “Le Morte D’Arthur”. He describes the life of King Arthur of Britain and the Knights of the Round Table. I also includes an account of the Knight’s quest for the Holy Grail.
The American poet, James Russell Lowell, wrote the best known modern story of Launfal, “The Vision of Sir Launfal”. In this tale, Launfal dreams of searching for the Holy Grail. Launfal does not find the Grail, but he learns its meaning when he helps a starving leper. The leper teachers him that the Grail symbolizes charity and mercy.
Or course, the best known of Arthurian tales is by Alfred Tennyson. His “Idylls of the King”, among which is the Holy Grail, is one on the most popular known.
