Blessed reader, you’ve done it. You’ve just stumbled across the Holy Grail of blogs.
Now, doesn’t that sound silly? Actually, of course, what you’ve really found is a blog about the Holy Grail, which is a bit different.
We’re used to finding the Holy Grail of this or that. Go to your favorite search engine and see what you turn up by looking for “holy grail of.”
I found lots of Holy Grails that way: the Holy Grail of applied physics, the Holy Grail of data storage management, the Holy Grail of the nonprofit sector - even the Holy Grail of Crap, which was such a delightful expression that I thought I might have found the Holy Grail of holy-grails-of. Google counts “about 1,860,000″ results for “holy grail of,” which by the time you read this we can probably safely round up to two million.
We all know what the expression means. There’s something out there so desirable that we’d give up everything to have it. When we find it, our lives will finally be complete, and the world will be paradise again.
That doesn’t actually happen to the fellow who finds the Holy Grail of data storage management. Even if it makes him filthy rich, he still doesn’t find paradise on earth, as you can confirm by following the antics of the filthy rich in the gossip columns.
But we all feel that inborn longing for lost paradise. We all know there has to be a way to get back there. The old romances of the Holy Grail were about that longing. And they were more than that: the best of the romances were nothing less than a road map to paradise.
That’s what The Grail Code is about: the powerful myth of the Holy Grail, the object of all desire, and what that myth really meant to the people who told the best stories about it.
But there’s far more to be said about the Holy Grail than one book can say. That’s what this blog is about. All the scenic byways and entertaining digressions we had to pass by in the book will find their home here. I’ll have a lot to say about the Holy Grail in modern culture, too - it’s getting a lot of attention these days.
Most of all, though, I’m here to enjoy myself. I hope my readers will come for the same reason.
Christopher Bailey
Postscript: We had meant this to be the first entry in the blog. But when we put up a test version of the site a few days ago, interested readers managed to stumble across it almost instantly, and one kind soul even left a comment in reply to one of the sample blog entries. Since the conversation has already begun, I won’t try to start over. Welcome once again to everyone.
April 24th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Wikipedia has a list of the “holy grails” of just about every subject…
April 25th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Coooool. I’m going to bang coconuts together whilst I read this blog. Har, har.
April 25th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Some years back I went through a “Grail” period and read a lot of the legends, ancient & modern. What I never found, but did a few weeks back was the claim that Christ’s cup from the Last Supper was indeed preserved, taken to Rome by St. Peter, and from there sent by St. Lawrence just before his matyrdom to Spain where it has been ever since, in a monastery in the Pyreenees (sp?). The Pyrenees have been popular in modern Grail legends, but I hadn’t come across this particular wrinkle before. The book even had photos and documentary evidence of sorts, mostly in translation of old Spanish and Latin docs.
It even seemed plausbile. Especially compared to the HOly Blood Holy Grail type garbage.
April 25th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
if anyone’s looking for a novel about the grail - and I don’t consider Dan Brown’s plagerism (no matter what the British courts decided)to be that - try Thomas Costain’s “The Silver Chalice” (1952). It’s a great read and much better researched than most of the tripe available today.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
There is a recent book called St. Laurence and the Holy Grail that addresses these other stories.
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/index.cfm/FuseAction/store.ItemDetails/SKU/19267/
April 26th, 2006 at 3:18 am
The Santa Caliz is a relic as precious as the Longinus Spear at the Vatican that is only venerated once a year
www.valencity.es/img/fscaliz.jpg
If you are lucky your local public television station may broadcast Werner Boote’s film
“Parsifal – Indiana Jones and Richard Wagner”
“a documentary on the new production of ‘Parsifal’ at the Vienna State Opera in April 2004. It led the director to Spain, where he went in an adventuresome search of the real Holy Grail precisely at Eastertide, when the Spanish nights are brightened by impressive processions. In the fortified monastery of San Juan de la Peňa he finds Wagner’s Gralsburg, he meets the “Caballeros del Santo Caliz”, who on Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper, reveal him the relic of the Last Supper chalice.”
DVD @ www.opera-quests.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=228135
The chalice is like this one at the National Gallery of Art - its a semiprecious carved stone cup set in a Gold neck-stem-pedestal
www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/medieval/medieval-1443.0.html
(shame that relics that held the Precious Blodd collect dust in Museums but that’s a different story for a different blog posting)
May 8th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
What do you think of Jessie Weston’s theory? She says that we can still find the Grail.
May 9th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Loyola Press reprinted The Silver Chalice. I second that it is a great book!