The Holy Grail and the Tarot, Part 2
An ongoing ramble through the Holy Grail’s first enigmatic appearances in literature and the challenges of trying to establish any solid connection with the Tarot. Perhaps read Part 1 first?
So what do we have this week? Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien De Troyes, Jessie Weston and the Four Jewels of the Tuatha Dé Danann - a hint of the dance to come between 12th and 20th century myth making.
We paused (you and I, dear reader) at the arrival of the first of the Grail Romances after a gallop through the many different threads that lead up to the Grail’s debut as the grail (as opposed to Celtic Cauldrons of Plenty or Inspiration). We touched on the Grail’s obvious reflection in the imagery of the Tarot but also noted the utter lack of any known historical connection between the Grail and the Tarot. We’ll probably end up restating that all over again.
That lack of an evidenced connection hasn’t stopped people from assuming there is one. R.J. Stewart claims that the Tarot originates in the Prophecies of Merlin, an imaginative (according to every scholar I’ve looked up, not to mention Geoffrey Ashe) 12th century text by the notorious author of the History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection - just that the imaginative leap needed is a very long one and the chasm in between is very deep. But I’m also interested in psychological truths, and Stewart and many others suggest a different way of looking the relationship between Tarot and Grail, one that stops worrying about historical fact and starts thinking and being inspired by cultural resonance.
In a very loose sense, I think medieval writers and artists understood this. For them, the way people thought a thousand years previously was not so different. When they painted their ancestors as soldiers, they put them in contemporary armour and placed anachronistic weapons and musical instruments in their hands. They were, you might say, in conversation with them. And this is where we might find a way to bring Grail and Tarot together more usefully - in conversation across the centuries without trying to pretend that they’re part of the same big unified field theory of myth and magic. That’s the Golden Dawn way of doing things. Me, I identify as a witch. Like the witches in Terry Pratchett novels, I make a shamble [insert link] out of whatever’s lying around if I want to discover something.
Perhaps, apart from promoting the independent significance and importance of the British Church, that’s what Geoffrey of Monmouth had in mind when he assembled the detail of Arthur’s reign and his burial in the island of Avalon from a mixture of classical sources and old oral traditions into his own ‘shamble’. His Life of Merlin freely plunders older Welsh sources recounting tales of a very different Arthur, a hero moving between this world and the other-world of Annwn but recasts him as more conventional medieval warrior king. But Geoffrey still can’t resist the pull of the old myths and his Arthur ends in Avalon, tended by nine sisters, the eldest of whom is Morgen. This turns out to Morgen’s first named appearance in literature. It also provides a tenuous link with the Grail in its cauldron form through Geoffrey’s presumed source - the sisters (presented as nine virgin priestesses) guarding a cauldron in the Other World, as described in the Preiddeu Annwfn. In this version, Arthur leads an epic expedition to successfully steal this marvellous artefact. It echoes, perhaps, earlier Irish tales of the Tuatha De Danann and their Four Treasures (see below).
Geoffrey doesn’t mention this. His fictions and re-tellings, however, form the background of an entire medieval genre and its here that the Grail more decisively makes an appearance and begins its lengthy, fascinating conversation with 20th century literature, magical practice and religion.
I’m talking, of course, about Chretien de Troyes, the 12th century French composer of epic poetry. De Troyes drew on Geoffrey of Monmouth and older traditions to create a his new vision of King Arthur, the Round Table and its denizens. It’s in his final, frustratingly-incomplete work called Perceval, the story of the Grail that we encounter the Grail and the Fisher King for the first time.
Reading De Troyes for the first time, two things struck me. Firstly, he’s very, very funny - many of the scenes in his stories could be dropped unedited into an extended cut of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One lengthy comic riff sees the noble Sir Gawain (of later …and the Green Knight fame) saddled with a thoroughly misandrist maiden who uses her status to bully Gawain relentlessly, constantly reminding him about the appalling misfortune she’s doomed to cause him and how much she loathes and resents him. Perceval is a clumsy oaf whose martial prowess seems to be that of a savant rather than a skilful knight and whose first interaction with a noble lady is more Carry On than Camelot. It’s bawdy, hilarious stuff. But De Troyes can turn on a sixpence, stylistically, and Perceval’s first glimpse of the Grail is mysterious and understated.
Perceval is on his way back to find his mother, whom he’d last left collapsed in a dead faint as he rode away determined to become a knight. Whilst trying to cross a river in flood, he encounters a nobleman out fishing. The noble gives Perceval directions to a castle where he can seek shelter for the night. There, as he sits down with the nobleman - who turns out to be monarch we’ve come to know as the Fisher King - to eat, he sees a boy carrying a bleeding lance, then a young woman carrying a grail through the hall, followed by boys carrying candelabra and another young woman carrying a silver platter.
The lance is the one used by the Roman centurion who pierced the Crucified Christ in his side to check he was dead. It is later revealed that the Fisher King’s father is kept alive by a single Host (the consecrated form of the unleavened bread used in Catholic holy communion) contained within the Grail. The silver platter and candelabra remain unelaborated but one can see why people might speculate.
One of those people was Jesse Weston whose book, From Ritual To Romance, formed one of the sources of T.S. Eliot’s the Wasteland. Weston was an ‘independent scholar’, whose translations of medieval texts achieved wide respect. Her book, rooted in the kind of fertility-god, pagan-to-Christian interpretation of myth popularised by James George Fraser, achieved considerable popularity at the time. She theorises that the Grail and its associated legends are a ‘Christianising’ of more ancient rituals and finally asserts that the Grail is fundamentally Gnostic in origin.
“The Grail story is not du fond en comble the product of imagination, literary or popular. At its root lies the record, more or less distorted, of an ancient Ritual, having for its ultimate object the initiation into the secret of the sources of Life, physical and spiritual. This ritual, in its lower, exoteric, form, as affecting the processes of Nature, and physical life, survives to-day, and can be traced all over the world, in Folk ceremonies, which, however widely separated the countries in which they are found, show a surprising identity of detail and intention. In its esoteric 'Mystery' form it was freely utilized for the imparting of high spiritual teaching concerning the relation of Man to the Divine Source of his being, and the possibility of a sensible union between Man, and God.”
In this, she follows many of those from the 19th century onwards who saw a similar theme in the objects of the Tarot (and which resonates in the form of Jungian reinterpretations later on in the century). The Grail Castle procession described by De Troyes has four objects - a cup, a spear, a silver platter and burning candelabra. Would it be too much of a stretch to relate those to the elemental suits of the tarot - cups, swords (rather than staffs), pentacles and the fiery wands (the candles of the candelabra)? Weston doesn’t think so, though she relates them through the alternative model of playing card suits:
“These cards are divided into four suits, which correspond with those
of the ordinary cards; they are:
Cup (Chalice, or Goblet)—Hearts.
Lance (Wand, or Sceptre)—Diamonds.
Sword—Spades.
Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies)—Clubs.”
From there, she cites two possible notions for the origin of the cards - Egypt and India (there’s a lot of talk about gypsies which is a bit uncomfortable for my more more snowflake-like tendencies) and the idea that tarot imagery might have come from India. She goes on to quote a private letter from Yeats, who must have speaking from a combination of his position as both Golden Dawn mage and mover and shaker of the Celtic Revival:
“Mr W. B. Yeats, whose practical acquaintance with Medieval and Modern Magic is well known, writes: "Cup, Lance, Dish, Sword, in slightly varying forms, have never lost their mystic significance, and are to-day a part of magical operations. The memory kept by the four suits of the Tarot, Cup, Lance, Sword, Pentangle (Dish), is an esoterical notation for fortune-telling purposes.””
She then pulls all this together - Nile Delta and Indian origins, magical divination and fertility symbols - and suggests that “the original use of the 'Tarot' would seem to have been, not to foretell the Future in general, but to predict the rise and fall of the waters which brought fertility to the land”.
This is all very Frazer, who reduces everything, everything to fertility rituals, in rather the way that the same way that Joseph Campbell never met a story that wasn’t a hero’s journey. To a man with a phallus, everything is a fertility god.
Weston’s conclusions are a bit of a stretch, to say the least, though it’s hard not to accept that both Grail and Tarot are echoing something. It’s just that there isn’t any clear evidence that it’s the same thing. What is very clear is how much writers and artists have wanted there to be a connection. I’ll have more to say on that later.
At this point, we also need to reckon with the other four symbols that loom large in the collective Grail dreamscape - the Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan described in sources such as the Book of the Taking of Ireland or The Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabála Eireann), the Tain and other early medieval poems and texts. The Book of Invasions is an eleventh century text constructed (as usual) out of a melange of earlier sources. Scholars disagree how much of the Book of Invasions is co-opted from earlier myth (the consensus seems to be ‘quite a lot’) and how much is an attempt, similar to that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, to set out an origin story for Ireland as a major player in the Christian world. It does after all start with the story of how Lucifer was jealous of Adam and worried about his place in heaven. From there, it goes into a description of the various invasions of Ireland, including that of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
The Tuatha De Danann are the closest we’re likely to get to a view of the pre-Christian Irish pantheon and include many names to (literally) conjure with - the Morrigan, Madba, Lugh and many others. Lugh, for example, is clearly a cognate of the well-attested continental Celtic God, Lug. The De Danann arrive in a dark cloud from their four cities, Fálias, Goirias, Muirias and Fionnias, bringing ‘magic and cunning’ and the first pointed weapons to be seen in Ireland. The various clerical hands at work on the Book speculate as to whether they are angels or devils and the Tuatha De Danann passed over the centuries into a great deal of Irish folklore as the Sidhe and the inhabitants of fairy mounds. As with so much touched on here, there are whole libraries of scholarship and tale-telling built around the De Danann and their relatives (e.g. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57434150-the-celtic-myths-that-shape-the-way-we-think) but our immediate interest is in the four treasures they bring with them, one from each city. A related text, the Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired - see a hugely useful source here https://ansionnachfionn.com/2016/05/12/the-four-jewels-or-treasures-of-the-tuatha-de-danann/) lists them as the Four Jewels:
The Great Fál, the Stone of Knowledge.
The Spear of Lugh (or Lug)
The Cauldron of the Dagdha (“From which no man ever went away unsatisfied”)
Nuadá’s Sword.
The parallel with the Tarot suits is obvious and irresistible. It’s possible that De Troyes was aware of sources mentioning the treasures but, if so we have no knowledge of them. It’s equally possible that he simply made it all up. He was after all, a poet and a world builder.
So where to go next?
What I’ve learned, in this and the first instalment, is that there is there is no obviously documented connection between the Grail, sources for tarot imagery and more ancient myths and symbols beyond that traceable in the imagination of a long lineage of writers and artists from De Troyés onwards.
But, as I hinted at the beginning of this essay, mightn’t that be enough? From part 3 onwards, I think I need to pull myself out of this fascinating tangle of ancient texts and speculation and start exploring how different writers have made use of the Grail and its associated imagery and how that might illuminate how we use and think about the Tarot. I have an intimidating amount of reading ahead of me so it might be more than a coupe of weeks before the next instalment emerges. As ever, suggestions as to where I might follow my nose next are very welcome!
Useful sources for this piece, other than those already referred to or linked to include
The Celtic Heroic Age, edited by John T Koch - hugely fascinating collection of translations of source texts
The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton
Chrétien De Troyes - Arthurian Romances, translated by William W Kiber
The Gods of the Celts by Miranda Green
The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies