What is the true Holy Grail? From The Grail Conspiracies

Foyle’s, so it’s said, is the largest bookshop in the world, spread out
across a handful of rickety old buildings on the edge of Soho. I had no
real idea what I should be looking for, but if it existed—whatever it was—
there was a good chance it was buried in the stacks at Foyle’s.

I started with the Mind/Body/Spirit section on the second floor, and dug
out a half-dozen books on the Grail quest. There were no chairs, but at
least there was a niche where I could lean against one of the few areas
of wall not covered by shelves.

According to Lili, Paul had stumbled on the Templar chest, which
contained what was “perhaps” the Holy Grail.

Which raised the question: exactly what is the Grail? It’s become a
figure of speech—the Holy Grail of computing, the Grail of new
medicine, diplomacy’s Holy Grail.

Was what Paul found—something that was “perhaps” the Grail—
another figure of speech? Maybe not.

So what IS the Grail? Everybody knows it’s the cup that Jesus used at
the Last Supper.

But sometimes what everybody knows is wrong. Or only part of the
answer.

Start fresh.

The Grail meant different things to different people, but most commonly
the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. In some versions, that same
cup, dish, holder, or vessel, had also been used to collect Jesus’ blood
after His side was pierced by the spear of the Roman Centurion
Longinus.

A vessel—a term that would make much more sense later.

A vessel—a container, perhaps a cup or bowl, or perhaps another kind
of container altogether, something we might not normally even think of
as a container.

Interesting connection: the spear of Longinus—the Holy Spear that,
according to Lili, Paul had been sent to La Rochelle to retrieve. But that
Spear was not and never had been in La Rochelle, something that
everybody other than Paul knew.

As a result of that contact with the divine, that cup, or vessel, or Grail,
supposedly became imbued with a variety of mystical powers from
another dimension. Precisely what those powers consisted of varied
with the legend, but among them were the power to heal, and the power
to work miracles.
According to another book, the Grail “exemplified the highest human
potential.” Whatever that meant.

Mind and Magic, by F.X. King, put it this way: the Grail quest was “. . .
for mystical union with the otherness that lies buried in the depths of
each individual psyche—a divine spark that is part of the Absolute.”

Further, the Grail was supposedly invisible to the unready or unworthy,
could only be seen by the pure in heart, and only when the time was
right for the Grail to reveal itself.

Again, very true, in a way I would understand only much later. The Grail,
in a manner of speaking, was there with me in Foyle’s, but invisible to
me because I didn’t know what I was looking for.

Call it ironic, or call it the very nature of what we refer to as the Grail,
but I was unable and unready to recognize what was already there.

Nor did I have an inkling then of what was really meant by that phrase,
“the highest human potential.”

□

The Grail as the cup from the Last Supper—that was the Grail story I
was used to. But—something I hadn’t understood earlier—that was by
no means the only version of the Grail story.

Not only were there a variety of alternate Grail legends that differed
significantly from the traditional Christian version, but some of those
other Grail accounts even predated Christianity.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a big seller in the 1980's postulated that the
Grail legend was a cover story conveying a different possibility
altogether: that the “grail” was code for the womb of Mary Magdalene,
who came to France bearing the unborn son of Jesus, who then
supposedly initiated the bloodline of much of European royalty.

That theory had also formed part of the plot of a thriller, The Da Vinci
Code, which made a huge splash a few years back.

Maybe there was something to that interpretation of “Grail” as bloodline.
Then again, maybe not.

In any case, that account was probably irrelevant, as Paul, back in
1944, would have been focused on the mainstream version—the Grail
as the cup of the Last Supper.

I stuck to that version, and came on something that made sense: the
legend of the quest for the Grail formed the core of German Richard
Wagner’s opera Parzival and other elements of his ring cycle . . .
operas that were particular favorites of Hitler.

□

I nearly missed the clue when it came: that word “disinformation” again,
but in a different context.

What if, the author suggested, all those legends of the search for the
physical Grail—the actual cup of Jesus—were in fact deliberate
disinformation?

What if, as another book put it, the Grail stories were “decoys to distract
the uninitiated or unworthy onto a search for something physical, when
in fact the core of the true Grail was a coded reference to the hidden
potentials of the human mind.”