The most imaginative of Arthurian romance, the one by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Grail is recreated as the striving towards the achievement of full humanity rather than the divine vision, the Grail nonetheless owes its powers to the Catholic Mass wafer. Or as Malore put it in turn the personal vision of the Eucharist.

But the belief in the real presence at the consecration of the Mass at the heart of the Grail stories were dramatically challenged in the early sixteenth century, and particularly during  the twentieth century, "the holy grail" has come to represent an abstract perfection, the idea that somewhere a perfect solution or object can be found. And this is where books and movies like the Da Vinci Code currently are plugging into.

The finding of the Grail at the "Bride's Well" in Glastonbury in 1906 the year Peladan published his booklet about the Grail with the Cathars near the border to Spain, is a strange one.

The father of a West Country doctor, Dr Goodchild, acquired a small howl of blue glass with a green surround, decorated with tiny crosses, on a visit to Bordighera in Italy in the 1890s. It was said to have been found in a cleft in a boulder, by a local peasant, and seemed old. His son, some years later, had a vision instructing him to take the howl to the "Women's Quarters at Glastonbury Abbey," and he did so when he inherited the bowl on his father's death in 1898, concealing it in the well there. The only person he seems to have told about this was William Sharp, otherwise known as the poet 'Fiona Macleod', author of romantic verses about the Hebrides.'' By whatever means, the secret seems to have been passed on after Goodchild's death, and the bowl was retrieved in 1906 after another eccentric character, Wellesley Tudor Pole, had a vision in which he was given directions to send a messenger "pure in the sight of God" to search a well at Glastonbury, which he also saw in his vision. He sent his daughter and a friend, and they identified the spot as Bride's Well. The glass cup was retrieved, and for a brief few months it was a sensation.

Dom Aidan Gasquet, the distinguished Benedictine scholar, took it to Birmingham for examination: A. E. Waite and Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society, looked at it in London. Waite was cautious and a little sceptical, but Wellesley Tudor Pole had known Archdeacon Wilberforce, Canon of Westminster, for some thirty years. Wilberforce believed that Tudor Pole had always suffered from religious mania, but he was impressed by the change in his behaviour, and his account of the affair. It was Wilberforce who presented it to the world as the Grail on 20 July 1907. It was quickly picked up by the press, and was shown to visiting celebrities such as Mark Twain.

The relic was returned to the West Country, and was kept at Clifton, in a room known as the Oratory, which was opened to visitors on request. It the absence of any real evidence as to its origin, interest gradually faded, and the "Oratory" was closed. The cup was kept by the Pole family and is now the property of the Chalice Well Trust. It was shown to members of the Society of Antiquaries when they visited Wells in 196S, and the general opinion was that it was too well preserved to be ancient.

The Glastonburv cup "discovered" by Welleslev Tudor Pole was almost immediately challenged by another such discovery in Wales. This was first discussed in a pamphlet published in Aberystwyth by an American visitor, Ethelwyn Amery, who disguised both the place where it was kept, and the name of the owner.

The house was soon identified as Nanteos, the home of George Powell. Amery described how the cup had been brought from Glastonbury by seven monks, who had escaped in the nick of time, just before the arrival of the commissioners sent by Henry VIII to dissolve the abbey. They fled to the abhev of Strata Florida near Abervstwyth, where the owners gave them shelter even though the abbey had passed into private hands. When the last of the monks died, the cup passed to the family 'until the Church should claim its own. In due course Strata Florida came by marriage to the Powells; the cup is not recorded before the middle of the nineteenth century, and was probably found at the abbey at some time during the previous hundred rears. It was first seen in public in 18-8, when it was described as having marvellous powers of healing. Recent archaeological analysis has shown it to be a mater-howl made of wvch-clm, of late medieval date, a valuable but by no means uncommon piece; most monasteries would have owned a number of them.

How could a casual find of such a medieval wooden vessel be transformed into a new- Holy Grail the stork of the flight from Glastonbury seems to have been deliberately invented using antiquarian accounts of the dissolution of the monasteries. No historical evidence has ever been offered for the stop the reputation of the cup grows by being repeatedly asserted. Such "invented" legends are nonetheless extraordinarily resilient: the Nantcos stork survived the criticism of Jessie Weston soon after it was first published, as well as the hostility of the supporters of the Glastonbury cup. It belongs to a similar genre to the 'urban myths' of modern folklore, where the eye­witness is always known to an acquaintance and the evidence is never direct. Such stories reveal more about the attitudes and aspirations of the society in which they were created than about any lost history. But the myth of the Nanteos Grail is alive and flourishing, as a search on the Internet will show.

Of these five "discoveries" of the real Grail the most significant was that at Glastonbury, which was part of the establishment of Glastonbury's image as a centre of ancient spiritual power. The development of the modern traditions associated with Glastonbury is far from clear; the name "Chalice Well," with its obvious overtones of the Grail, seems to be eighteenth century, but many of the other stories that are now given as long-established are probably the result of this early twentieth-century enthusiasm. The extent to which this had spread is shown by the fact that when the abbey itself was put up for auction by private owners in 1907, it was very nearly bought by a group of Americans who intended to found a "school of Chivalry" there. And occultists such as the writer Dion Fortune (Violet Firth) were attracted to Glastonbury; she was a member of one of the successors to the original Order of the Golden Dawn, and deeply involved in theosophy. Her book Avalon of the Heart was typical of the kind of enthusiasm that the Abbey and its surroundings now aroused, and in her writings she invoked not only its Christian past, but also "the ancient faith of the Britons ... its relics obliterated, its legends bent to a Christian purpose ... shadowy and veiled." The idea of a literal Grail presence at Glastonbury resurfaces from time to time, as in Flavia Anderson's The Ancient Secret,  which offers us a Grail which is a crystal sphere used to generate fire, at the centre of mysteries celebrated in "the British Hades," which proves to be none other than the famous caves at Wookev Hole.

Here Glastonbury was involved in the fringes of the occult movement and in the search for the physical Grail at the beginning of the twentieth century. A different vision, that of the town as an artistic centre, was behind the proposal  to create a "National Festival Theatre for Music and Drama" at Glastonbury, invoking the example of Bayreuth.

The festival itself had been started by the composer Rutland Boughton, who had embarked on a cycle of Arthurian operas; it was supported by leading lights in the fields of drama and music, Galsworthy, Shaw, Beecham and Elgar among them. Around the time Rudolf Steiner build his own performance temple in Dornach Switzerland intended as a new Grail center,  the first Glastonbury festival was held  overshadowed by the beginning of the First World War and consisting of performances with a piano and amateur chorus rather than the professional forces that had been envisaged. But the event was deemed a success, and was the first of a series which was to run until 1927; the festivals included performances of Boughton's Arthurian operas as he finished them. In  the Grail section of the romances; Galahad owes more to his Communist politics than to the ethereal spirituality of Glastonbury, and instead of achieving the elitist Grail, he emerges as the champion of the oppressed.

This heady mixture of mysticism, romantic nostalgia, Arts and Crafts liberalism and general eccentricity may, to the casual visitor, still seem to pervade Glastonbury today. And it is from this fertile ground for the imagination that there sprang the most massive work of fiction centred on the Grail ever to be written. John Cowper Powys' A Glastonbury Romance outdoes even the medieval romances in sheer length. It is a vast assemblage of different ideas and observations, veering from the Rabelaisian to the numinous within the space of a couple of sentences. At the heart of the story is the immemorial Mystery of Glastonbury. Christians had one name for this Power. the ancient heathen inhabitants had another, and a quite different one. Everyone who came to this spot seemed to draw something from it, attracted by a magnetism too powerful for anyone to resist, but as different people approached they changed its chemistry, though not its essence, by their own identity, so that upon none of them it had the same psychic effect ... Older than Christianity, older than the Druids, older than the gods of Norsemen or Romans, older than the gods of the neolithic men, this many-named Mystery had been handed down to subsequent generations by three psychic channels; by the channel of popular renown, by the channel of inspired poetry, and by the channel of individual experience.

The medieval feudal royals were obsessed with family trees. Many churches show a "Jesse Tree" on the windows which is the family tree of Jesus. Its possible that to claim legitimacy they eventually came to imagine some continuity back to Christ.

Thus the Holy Grail  during the 19th century was seen as a sacred container of divine (Aryan) blood, as legends linked the holy history of the Bible with the British Isles. The coronation stone at Westminster Abbey had supposedly been used by Jacob, father of the ten tribes of Israel, and brought to the British Isles by Jeremiah the Prophet. Local tradition held that Jesus (his father allegedly Pandera an invading  Pagan from the north) visited the British Isles during the "missing years" of his biography.

As early as 1563 in fact, historian John Fox stressed the "uniqueness of the English as 'a chosen people' with a Church lineage stretching back to Joseph of Arimathea." Pioneering British-Israelites took the notion further by claiming that Britons in fact were Hebrews.

Presenting himself as "Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty," Richard  Brothers in fact promised to lead the lost tribes of Israel back to Jerusalem and predicted the millennium to begin  November 1795.

The predominate idea of the British-Israel movement was that Great Britain was the home of one or all lost tribes of Israel implying that the inhabitants were God's Chosen People. It’s prime source of appeal, to advocates, was that it sought to affirm biblical prophecy directed specifically to the Anglo-Saxon race and a unique covenant, with God, marking out the elite nature of that race.

This was fuelled by new ideas of evolution and racial superiority imbuing British society with a duty to spread a superior culture, system and way of life to less developed societies.

But Professor P. Smyth of the Royal Society of Edinburgh who gave an account of his measurements of the Great Pyramid concluding that whatever it’s subsequent use it was originally constructed as a standard for Imperial weights and measures.

According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea founded the Abbey in Glastonbury, claimed by  New Age- John Michell during  the early 1970’s to be identical with "the New Jerusalem" ground plan.

Rudolf Steiner when he needed  money to build his temple, the first all in wood, burned down 1923, later called Goetheanum, he suggested that the "true history" of Percival would have partly taken place near that same property.

And Rudolf Steiner inspired his student, Walter Johannes Stein to write a dissertation which came to be published by R. Steiner's Theosophical organization as "The Ninth Century: World History in the Light of the Holy Grail," of course since the Da Vinci Code reprinted 2003.

W.J. Stein, detailed what was considered the historical and symbolic background behind the Grail sagas, and contained a genealogical chart Stein calls the "Grail bloodline." One side extends into the royal house of France. Another extends down to Godfrey of Bouillon.

Part of Stein's thesis is that events in the lives of actual historical figures served as models for the characters and for some events in the Grail stories. According to Stein, the people associated with this family tree were acknowledged in their time as being of a high spiritual nature and having paranormal capacities. Yet he also stresses that these capacities had vanished from this family hundreds of years ago.

An undisciplined reader of Stein could easily confuse the historical persons with symbols. Stein's intent is actually to illustrate how the positive spiritual forces represented by the Holy Grail are sometimes manifested in the lives and actions of people and how those actions can affect society and events. He did not in any way state or imply that the Holy Grail was, or that it represented, a bloodline. He knew very well that is not the case.

These are some of  the sources that, when twisted and distorted, were used to fabricate the fiction that a special bloodline supported by an age-old esoteric society lay behind most of the key political events and mysteries of French history, and even the Holy Grail itself.

There is but one unsolved mystery, and that is the book which Philip of Flanders is said to have given to Chretien de Troyes. In Witches, Druids and King Arthur by Ronald Hutton Robert Mathiesen’s theory is mentioned that claims this was a text similar to the so called Sworn Book, perhaps already embedded in the form of a Latin allegorical poem.

The Sworn Book, is written by a (pseudo) Honorius of Thebes. It invokes Solomon as one of its principal patrons, and belongs to the books where magic becomes an extension of Christian practice.

In the first account of the Grail story, Perceval's interview with the hermit in Chretien's Story of the Grail, the hermit whispered a prayer in his ear, and contained many of the names of Our Lord including the secret one. The "secret names" of Our Lord is a highly unusual idea, certainly at the end of the twelfth century.

Chretien - whose name means "Christian," and which might perhaps be a nom de plume - realized that this knowledge could safely be presented as a romance.

It has been argued that there is a reference to it in a work written in 1247, but other scholars believe it to be as late as the mid-fourteenth century which would date it later as Chretien de Troyes "Romance of the Grail." The Jewish kabhalah, from which the names in The Sworn Book are partly drawn, and from which the idea of the multiple names of God and their power is derived, was not accessible in the West until the late thirteenth century, and while it is possible that Chretien and "Honorius of Thebes" might both have had knowledge of it direct from Jewish sources, this would be quite exceptional, and the dating further undermines  Robert Mathiesen’s new argument described in Witches, Druids and King Arthur by Ronald Hutton.

Others have convincingly argued  that the theme of the vision within the Grail belongs, not to ritual magic, but to the perfectly orthodox circles of Cistercian mysticism.

John Dee was also one of the owner’s of  The Sworn Book but Dee's magic rather than ritual Catholicism, was more like the version Marcello Vicino strived for, that of the lost word in the form of the Biblical "Adamic" language.

But there is no one "truth" about the Grail. All we can do is suggest how it may have arisen, and what it may mean, because, I would argue, the force that shaped it is not history, but imagination, the creative thought that subtly built on an unfinished story, and invented the Grail. All we can do is to offer a possible account of its history of this  interplay between imagination and belief.

At the opposite extreme to the searchers for a physical Grail are those who see the Grail as emblem of a secret tradition within the Christian Church. The kernel of the idea of a "secret"' about the Grail is, as we have seen, part of the earliest Grail romances: but there it is a theological secret, the secret of the Mass of the Catholic Church. In effect, that secret is the Church's way of saving that the doctrines surrounding the Mass are too subtle for ordinary people to understand.

But the Grail romances can also be read "as a great attempt in the middle ages to combat the supremacy of Rome in the history of the propagation of the doctrines of the Church, and to substitute another authority for that of St Peter." How real this attempt may have been is very much open to question, but it has been argued by modern scholars that there were just such hidden or heretical trends which relate to the Grail.

One line of argument sees these trends as being within the Church itself. Behind the outward forms of faith and worship centred on the Eucharist, there was a second layer of initiation and secret knowledge, in which the Eucharist was represented by the Grail. The first and outward layer is represented by the work of St Peter and St Paul; the Second by St John and Joseph of Arimathea. In this scheme of things, Joseph, who is a minor, almost unknown figure in the Gospels, becomes the central figure in the hidden tradition, a tradition which persisted at least until the end of the seventeenth century.

Joseph, as the "secret disciple" of Jesus and guardian of his body, is seen as the head of this alternative tradition, the record of which was deliberately suppressed in the Gospels. In St John's Gospel, he is said to have kept his adherence to Christ's teachings secret 'for fear of the Jews'; but this is seen as a later addition, making the secrecy of his belief the crucial point - John is indicating that the whole secret tradition, otherwise unrecorded, actually exists. The Grail, in this tradition, is a substitute - more direct than in the Mass - for Christ's body. The problem is that the evidence for such a hidden cult comes largely from two sources: the Grail romances themselves, which, as we have seen, are not a likely means of transmitting discussions about theology (let alone a secret and potentially highly controversial doctrine); and froth selective reading among the huge mass of tracts on the vexed question of transubstantiation. This version of the "secret tradition" is, at the end of the day, only what had once been orthodox belief, overlaid with the legendary history of Joseph of Arimathea.

A similar scheme for a secret doctrine of the Grail brings in as evidence W'olfram's Parzival, and with it a whole host of exotic elements; here we have a 'defined doctrine', either contained in a book, as in Robert de Boron, or explained by a master (such as Trevrizent in Parzival ). "This doctrine concerns a Mystery present on earth, in the fullness of its celestial power, which call only he accessed through a path of qualification and in danger of death." It is kept in a hidden centre (the Grail castle) and has its own special liturgy.

But the presence of this doctrine can only be explained in terms of traditional esoteric teachings, which are self-referring, and cannot be subjected to normal scientific criticism. However, it has been argued that examination of the Islamic influences found in Wolfram reveals the sources of this tradition, which draws also on the Jewish esoteric lore. To validate this argument, we have to accept the reality of  "Kyot" as Wolfram's source.

Wolfram mentions one Flegetanis, that  is really the name of an Arab book, Felek Thani or the second sphere, he is associated with the evangelist's sign of the bull, and so forth.

Any contradictory point in Wolfram's text is put down to the fact that he is protecting "the secret of the transmission lot the story which he was revealing against the horrible misunderstanding of ordinary people." And so the readings and In isreach figs and speculations go on: the combat between Feirefiz and Parzival is a symbol of the "essential unity of Christianity and Islam (and implicitly, at least, of Judaism)." Once the Celtic elements are brought in, the Grail becomes the "repository, spiritual and doctrinal, of the primordial Tradition.

This "primordial Tradition" leads us back into the occult revival of the 1890’s, and to the Theosophists. But it was a French writer, Rene Guenon, who regarded the theosophical Society with deep suspicion, who developed this idea in relation to the Grail in his hook Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World).

And as I mentioned in part 1 of this three part series it was during the same occult revival that  Peladan wrote a pamphlet with the suggestion that the Grail was associated with the Cathars.

On the face of it, the Cathars are as unlikely to he connected with the Grail as the Templars: the Grail represents exactly those aspects of Christianity which they rejected - the essentially Christocentric rituals of the Church. For them Christ was not the central figure in their worship, but merely the messenger, hearer of the new gospel of love. The Crucifixion and Resurrection were not part of their belief. So the Grail, which meant nothing without these two central tenets, could mean nothing to them. We have seen how in terms of the medieval romances such an association is unlikely.

Josephin Peladan’s pamphlet on the subject appeared in 1906, and its title was The secret of the troubadours: from Perceval to Don Quixote, and it was really a general study of medieval chivalric literature.

The "secret" was no more than the continuity between medieval literature and the age of Rabelais and Cervantes:

"Before seeking the oracle of the dive houteille lin Rabelaisl, our naive ancestor sought the Holy Grail. In defeat, he is called Don Quixote: this is the secret of the troubadours."

But it was this pamphlet which came to the attention of a  German scholar, Otto Rahn, who as part of a thesis project, undertook research on the Cathars, also inspired  by the work of Maurice Magre, who in Magicians and Illuminati had linked Hindu philosophy with the Cathars, whom he called "the Buddhists of the West."

Rahn took up the story with enthusiasm, and his book Crusade agamst the Grail and this, is the text in which the story of the Cathar Grail came to general attention.

His thesis depends on using the sparse physical descriptions of places given by Wolfram, finding their equivalents in the Cathar homeland. The identification Of Munsalvaesche with Montsegur, for instance, is based on a line in Parzival which says "Never was a dwelling so well fitted for defence as Munsalvaesche," which supposedly corresponds to "safe mountain," said to be the meaning of the name Montsegur.

A further confirmation of the identity of Montsegur as the Grail castle is the idea found at the end of the Middle Ages, that the Grail is the Venusberg, home of the pagan goddess of love: Montsegur is claimed as a pagan site.

But Rahn's next book, The Courtiers of Lucifer recounted his travels in the Cathar lands and elsewhere in Europe in search of the Cathars and their philosophy, and of the troubadours, whom, like Peladan, lie regarded as closely connected with the Cathars. In the course of his travels, lie develops his thesis in terms all too familiar from Nazi propaganda of the period. The Cathars were said to be Aryans who worshipped the morning star, Lucifer.

Christianity was invented by the Jews, who tried to make men worship a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. The Grail was the symbol of Lucifer, and was the great treasure of the Cathars for that reason, while the Church had invented the story of the Grail as the cup of the Last Supper to discredit the Cathar relic, which they knew to be the true Grail.

Because Rahn was an ardent Nazi and member of the SS, stories began to circulate that the Nazis had mounted a search for the Cathar Grail. Rahn was supposed to have had a double identity.

Other sources say that members of a French right-wing society conducted a dig in Cathar territory in search of  the runic tablets which according to certain rumours were at the root of the text of Wolfram.

When local people gathered at Montscgur on the exact day of the Tooth anniversary of its fall a German aircraft is said to have flown over the ruins, tracing a Celtic cross in the sky.

But none of those present seem to have made a formal statement to this effect; even more improbable is the suggestion that Rosenberg was on hoard. Since Rosenberg devotes a bare four or five lines to Catharism in The Myth o f the Twentieth Century.