Women and the origins of the Grail

The voices of the wells and the voices of the Grail

Hi everyone

This is quite a long post, as I want (as always) to offer you a proper perspective on the role that women play in the Grail myths and romances, as an antidote to those who so often present these stories simply as examples of the Hero’s Journey. This all derives from extensive research carried out during my MA in Celtic Studies so is both accurate and up-to-date.

This article forms part of an extensive and ongoing series here at ‘The Art of Enchantment’ about reclaiming women’s myths and stories (clicking on the link takes you to a list of the others) – primarily those from Britain and Ireland, but extending on occasion into some wider European traditions. I’m covering everything from ancient goddesses to early saints, and I hope that the series will inspire those of you with ancestry in these islands, and all those who live here, to understand that in our mythology and pre-Christian cosmology, women – as I wrote about extensively in If Women Rose Rooted – represented the creative essence of the universe, and carried with them the spiritual and moral authority of the Otherworld. I hope that this series of articles will result in a useful resource for you all, for stories from our native traditions which have women at their centre.

The key message of this article, and the stories I’m offering in it, is that although the quest for the Grail might be embarked upon by heroes (though see this post for the reasons why, even then, I don’t consider the Grail quests to be straightforward examples of the Hero’s Journey, but rather of what I call the post-Heroic Journey), the Grail itself is the province of women. Women are its keepers and its messengers – the voices of the Grail.

Those who accept that the Grail derived from pre-Christian myths and stories, understand from the rich and wide context of those stories that the Grail represents the wisdom and the life-giving force of the Otherworld, which is in a sense the anima mundi, the soul of the Earth itself – and which also, in the oldest and widest of European traditions, is represented as a female force.

A bit of background on the Grail

The word graal, as it is spelled in the earliest texts, comes from Old French graal or greal, meaning ‘a cup or bowl of earth, wood, or metal’. The most commonly accepted etymology derives it from the Latin gradalis or gradale via an earlier form, cratalis, a derivative of crater or cratus, which was, in turn, borrowed from Greek krater (κρατήρ, a large wine-mixing vessel). In the 15th century, English writer John Hardyng invented a fanciful new etymology for the Old French term san-graal (or san-gréal), which meant ‘Holy Grail’. He said it should be written sang real, meaning ‘royal blood’ – leading to a whole body of speculation that it referred to Jesus’ bloodline, and to a good deal of conflation of different mythologies as a consequence. Although it’s found its way into plenty of modern fiction, scholars of the old texts do not take this idea seriously.

The medieval Grail literature can be divided into two categories. Texts in the first category focus on Arthur's knights discovering the Grail castle, or otherwise questing after the Grail. In later texts we see a major shift, as the Grail's history is linked to Joseph of Arimathea and the story of Christ. The Grail is first featured in Perceval, le Conte du Graal (‘The Story of the Grail’) by Chrétien de Troyes, who claimed he was working from a source book given to him by his patron, Count Philip of Flanders. (Such a book has never been found; we don’t know whether he made that up or whether there really was a lost old text.) In this incomplete poem, dated sometime between 1180 and 1191, the Grail hasn’t acquired the ‘holy’ status with which it would be endowed in later texts.

The view that the origins of the Grail myths and romances should be seen as deriving from Celtic mythology and not from the Christian tradition, as later texts prefer to suggest, was first championed by Celtic scholars Roger Sherman Loomis, Alfred Nutt and Jessie Weston. Loomis traced a number of parallels between medieval Welsh and Irish literature and the Grail romances. Many of these theories associate the Grail with the rich tradition of Otherworldly, life-giving cauldrons which appear throughout early Celtic literature. I won’t go into all this here because it constitutes a very long story, but will simply say that there are indeed many parallels. Many Celtic scholars (including myself) believe that the Grail is also related to Otherworldly cups and chalices in our oldest traditions – all of them borne by women.

The Grail Bearers: women who hold the cup

The Virgin of the Grail, Dante Gabriel Rossetti