The Temple of the Grail

“Over the last five years I have been searching for the places where the Grail was believed to be kept—its home, if you will. All of the great stories that have been told about it agree that it has a home, a place towards which seekers could travel. Many would say Glastonbury, or Montségur in France, or any number of other places. But two years ago, I happened upon two medieval books that told a different story. One of these, written in Medieval French, had never been translated into English, but it told a remarkable story of a forgotten hero named Sone de Nansay (which is also the title of the text). It contained a very detailed description of a place where the Grail was kept, on a mysterious island on which stood a remarkable building—a Temple of the Grail. Then I found another, even more obscure text: The Later Titurel, written in German by a man named Albrecht in the 13th century. This, too, described a building, even including measurements. I set about the task of getting the parts where the Grail Temples were described.” -

John Matthews Temples of the Grail

"When he was fifty years of age, an angel emerged from the Grail and spoke to Titurel. It made known to him that all of his life from this point should be devoted to its service. With celestial music the angel guided him through a deep and seemingly impenetrable wilderness—the Forest Salvasch, in the land of Salvaterre…Here Titurel resolved to build a temple to house the Grail, which still hovered above the mountain. No wood was to be used except for the seating, where aloe wood was used; all else was constructed of pure gold and precious stones that brought warmth in winter and coolness in summer. Titurel sought counsel from those learned in the virtues of such stones, as they had once been taught by Pythagoras and Hercules. Thus he learned of the fire-stone known as abestus, which sends forth constant fire; also the water-stone elitropia, which has healing properties and is good against lies, deception and poison. These he chose to be the basic materials of the temple.… To begin with Titurel cleared the plants and grass that covered the top of the mountain. Underneath was a block of pure onyx, six feet high and projecting thirty feet around the Temple. Titurel ordered the onyx to be polished until it shone like the moon. Then, as he was contemplating the best design for the temple, he received guidance from the Grail. There, on the polished stone, he found a ground plan sketched out that told him the exact dimensions the building should take…The work [on the temple] was so great that it could never be finished [by human hands alone]. Therefore, the Grail sent the king a message in writing: Whatever he needed would come to him from the Grail—including every requirement of the master builder…Here the Grail was kept every day…” - excerpt from the text of The Later Titurel

The description continued for another dozen pages in astonishing detail. It was very clearly the description of an actual building. But what building, and where was it? There were clues hidden in the text, and we began to follow them. At first, we got nowhere; then I remembered an essay, written years previously by an American scholar named Arthur Upham Pope. In this he described how, having, like myself, come across the Titurel story, he had found an actual site, hidden deep within the country now called Azerbaijan, that sounded strangely like the description on the book. He organized an expedition to the place, and there he found the ruins of a building that matched the description by Albrecht in the 13th century to an extraordinary degree. This was just the beginning of the trail Gareth and I followed, which lead us to one of the most mysterious characters ever to emerge from the middle ages: Prester John, a mystical king said to rule over a kingdom at the furthest edges of the known world. This man was both a priest and a king (as his title "Prester," told us) and he had written a letter to the crowned heads of Europe in the 13th century, describing his kingdom in terms that we immediately recognized as being almost identical to the writings of Albrecht and the anonymous author of Sone de Nansay. In the end we were not at all surprised to find that towards the end of the Titurel manuscript we found Prester John taking over the guardianship of the Grail when Titurel himself dies, aged 500 years. With all of these texts now before us, and armed with the work produced by Arthur Upham Pope, we had all we needed to identify what we believe to be the mysterious Temple of the Grail. As it turned out, the building in Azerbaijan was just one of several buildings, built during the middle ages to act as places of initiation. To visit one of these places was to come as close to the Grail as one could. Many of them are still there; still inviting pilgrims to enter and walk within them and, possibly, discover the place where the Grail was, and is, still hidden. -

John Matthews Temples of the Grail

The excerpt is from Temples of the Grail by John Matthews and Gareth Knight (Llewellyn, 2019), and it's drawn from their translation of the Jüngere Titurel (the Later Titurel) by Albrecht von Scharfenberg, 13th century. Matthews and Knight produced what they describe as the first English translation of the relevant Grail Temple sections.

"When he was fifty years of age, an angel emerged from the Grail and spoke to Titurel. It made known to him that all of his life from this point should be devoted to its service. With celestial music the angel guided him through a deep and seemingly impenetrable wilderness—the Forest Salvasch, in the land of Salvaterre…Here Titurel resolved to build a temple to house the Grail, which still hovered above the mountain. No wood was to be used except for the seating, where aloe wood was used; all else was constructed of pure gold and precious stones that brought warmth in winter and coolness in summer. Titurel sought counsel from those learned in the virtues of such stones, as they had once been taught by Pythagoras and Hercules. Thus he learned of the fire-stone known as abestus, which sends forth constant fire; also the water-stone elitropia, which has healing properties and is good against lies, deception and poison. These he chose to be the basic materials of the temple."

The Grail Temple: The Shrine of the Heart

“It is a state of spiritual separation that causes the failure of Lancelot and those like him who seek the Grail for their various and diverse reasons, and it is for this reason that the Grail Temple exists: to show the way back to a state of unity within the divine impulse of creation. - Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“the forms most often incorporated into the design of the temple are those of the circle and the square—symbolic representations of heaven and earth—so that many consist of squared stones set up in circles (the megalithic temples) or rectangular buildings supported by rounded pillars (Egyptian, Hellenic, and Hebrew temples). These can also be seen as archetypal images of the masculine and feminine, so that the circle of the heavens and the square of earth unite in a single image.”

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“It is a state of spiritual separation that causes the failure of Lancelot and those like him who seek the Grail for their various and diverse reasons, and it is for this reason that the Grail Temple exists: to show the way back to a state of unity within the divine impulse of creation. It is for this reason also that we first read of the appearance of the Grail as an aftermath to the story of the Fall. It is said that the Grail was entrusted to Adam at the beginning of time, but that after the Fall it remained behind since it was too holy an object to be taken into the world. But there is a tradition that says Seth, a child of Adam and Eve whom the Gnostics revered as a hidden master, made the journey back to the gate of Eden in search of the sacred vessel. He was permitted to enter and remained for forty days, at the end of which the Grail was given into his keeping, to serve both as a reminder of what had been lost and as a sign of hope and redemption to come, though this remained unrecognized until the time of Christ, when the symbol of the Grail as Chalice became established in Christian belief. What is most especially important here, as the Vulgate Cycle says, is that “those who possessed the Grail after (Seth)…were by this very fact, able to establish a Spiritual center destined to replace the lost Paradise, and to serve as an image of it.”115 It is this image that is represented by the Temple of the Grail, as a place where creator and created can meet and converse as once they had in Paradise. In this way the temple can be seen to represent a cosmic evolutionary diagram. It is as though the temple builders, by inviting the Divine Presence to descend into the temenos, were asking not only to be guided along the path towards the unity of perfection, but also anticipating that God or the gods would evolve through contact with them. They seemed to be saying that while the gods and spirit and humanity matter—and the latter two cannot evolve separately—they are linked like two interlocking circles, which are only complete when superimposed precisely, one upon the other. Thus all temples and churches were intended as physical glyphs to be read by both humankind and their gods, as a mirror reflecting images of the temporal and divine upon each other.” - Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

The Divine Vessel

Completing the Temple All temples are incomplete. They can only be made whole by the direct participation of the creator, who must stretch down to meet and accept the rising prayers of their creation. So with the Grail; it too must be hallowed, made complete, as by the touch that makes blood of wine and flesh of bread. The Grail is made whole only when it is full, and it is not for nothing that the shape most often assumed by it is that of the chalice. If we see this as two triangles, one above the other, meeting at the apex point to form a nexus, we can see that it is an image of this divine meeting of upper and lower, temporal and divine. The lower part of the Grail is of this world, penetrating time and space at once; its upper part is already in the paradisal state beyond time and beyond space. At the center is the temple, the sacred space at the heart of the circle, in which lies the adytum, which stretches below the earth but is open to the sky. Thus the ancient temples were the simplest and most direct means of contact with the Divine, as today the most simple and direct method is the building and establishment of an inner temple, a temple of the heart. Dealing with the response of humankind to the voice of the creator, the Word, the Gnostic Authoritative Teaching, says: “the senseless man hears the call, but he is ignorant of the place to which he has been called. And he did not ask…where is the temple into which I should go and worship my hope…” This could hardly be clearer. In the quest of the Grail, the failure to ask an important question is the cause of the failure of many knights who arrive at the castle. It is Lancelot’s failure, and it is the failure of all who do not listen to the Voice of the Light. Qabalistic teaching has it that “the temple has been destroyed, but not the path of purification, illumination, and union that lay concealed in it.” For when the perfected soul of mankind “rises like incense from the golden altar of the heart and passes through the most inward curtains of his being to the holy of holies within,” then the two cherubim who stand guard over the Ark of the Covenant (of the heart) “are united in the presence of the One in Whom the soul recognizes its eternal life and its own union with Him. Henceforward the soul is called the eternally ‘living’ (hayah), the ‘one and only’ (yehidah),” the perfect. The Light comes like veritable tongues of fire upon all who reach the center of the temple and find there the seat of God in the heart of his creation.” - Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

The Temple of the Grail

“Thus in the earliest temples of which we know, the stones, which gave megalithic man his name, were erected in circles, set up on power points in the earth so that they served as living extensions of the earth herself—the mother holding out her arms towards the moon, the sun, and the stars. These huge astrological observatories were built as much for the gods as for humankind—not just to honor them but also to invite them to participate in the ritual living of life in and around them. Or to quote Plotinus again: Those ancient sages who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines…showed insight into the nature of the All (perceiving that) though the Soul is everywhere its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“The imagery of the Grail Temple is consistent. It is usually at the top of a mountain, which is in turn surrounded either by an impenetrable forest or by deep water. Access, if any, is by way of a perilously narrow, sharply edged bridge, which became known as the Sword Bridge. To make entrance even harder, the whole temple or the castle that contained it would often revolve rapidly, making it almost impossible to gain entry by normal means. Once within, more perils awaited, and for those few who succeeded in reaching the center, where lay the Chapel of the Grail, the experience could, as in Lancelot’s case, be both chastening and parlous. Nor was the castle without its human guardians; at an early stage in the mythos a family of kings, supported by a specially chosen body of knights, appeared to serve and protect the sacred vessel. It is from this tradition that the association with the Templars emerged. The most completely developed description of the medieval Grail Temple is to be found in the Middle High German poem Der Jüngere Titurel (circa 1270) attributed to Albrecht von Scharffenberg.118 Here the lineage of the Grail Kings is[…]” “traced back to Solomon—a detail that, as we shall see, is of some importance—but the setting is firmly medieval in its details. According to Albrecht, Titurel, the grandfather of the famous Grail knight Parsifal, was fifty when an angel appeared to him and announced that the rest of his life was to be dedicated to the service of the sacred vessel. Accordingly, he was led into a wild forest from which arose the Mountain of Salvation, Muntsalvasche, where he found workers gathered from all over the world who were to help him to build a castle and temple for the Grail—which at that time floated houseless in the air above the site, supported by heavenly hands. So Titurel set to work and leveled the top of the mountain, which he found to be of onyx and which, when polished, “shone like the moon.” Soon after he found the ground plan of the building mysteriously engraved on this fabulous surface. The completion of the temple took some thirty years, during which time the Grail provided not only the substance from which it was built, but also food to sustain the workmen. Already the Grail is seen as a provider—a function it continues to perform. But more rarely, and importantly for our argument, it is here seen as contributing directly in the construction of its own temple, making one a part of the other, the design nonhuman in origin and the execution only attributed to the hands of man. At this point in the poem Albrecht devotes one hundred and twelve lines to a description of the temple so specific in detail as to leave one in little doubt that he is describing a real building.119 The temple is high and circular, surmounted by a great cupola. Around this are twenty-two chapels arranged in the form of an octagon; and over every pair of these is an octagonal bell-tower surmounted by a cross of white crystal and an eagle of gold. These towers encircle the main dome, which is fashioned from red gold and enameled in blue. Three entrances lead inside: one in the North, one in the West, a third in the South from which flow three rivers. The interior is rich beyond compare, decorated with intricate carvings of trees and birds; while beneath a crystal floor swim artificial fish, propelled by hidden pipes of air fuelled by bellows and windmills. Within each of the chapels is an altar of sapphire, curtained with green samite, and all the windows are of beryl and crystal, decorated with other precious stones. In the Dome itself a clockwork sun and moon move across a blue enameled sky in which stars are picked out in carbuncles. Beneath it, at the very center of the temple, is a model of the whole structure in miniature, set with the rarest jewels, and within this is kept the Grail, itself a microcosmic image of the whole universe of creation.

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“By medieval times, when the original site of the Solomonic Temple had been demolished and rebuilt well before it became a Muslim shrine, the chamber mentioned by Ibn Khaldun had become known as a place of entrance and exit for the spirits of the dead, while of the original structure nothing now remained above ground. The Crusaders, however, continued to refer to it as the Templum Dominum (Temple of God), and it became sacred to the three major religions of the book. For the Jews it was the site of Solomon’s Altar of the Holocausts, the Holy of Holies, while to the Muslims it was the place from which the Prophet had ascended to heaven, so that for a time it rivaled Makkah (Mecca) and was attributed with the property of “hovering” above the earth. Thus the geographer Idrisi referred to it in 1154 as “the stone that rose and fell” (lapis lapsus exilians), which so closely recalls Wolfram von Eschenbach’s description of the Grail itself as lapis exilis (stone of exile), sometimes interpreted as “the stone which fell from heaven. It seems that here we have a paradigm for the whole history of the Grail and of the temple built to house it. The Grail, originating in paradise, can also be said to have “fallen” by being brought into this world by Seth. A late Gnostic account describes how it was, in fact, originally the sword of Lucifer but became impacted as he fell though space until, when he reached the earth, it had assumed the form of a cup. Through its use by Christ to perform the first Eucharist, it is hallowed and the world, like the lost Eden, redeemed so that it, too, “rises.” Equally, the stones used in the building of the temple and the design for its construction, as described by Albrecht, can be seen to have “fallen from heaven.”

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“Chandogya Upanishad it is held that In the centre of the Castle of Brahma, our own body, there is a small shrine, in the form of a lotus flower, and within can be found a small space. We should find who dwells there and want to know him…for the whole universe is in him and he dwells within our heart.141 Or, as one might say, in the center of the Castle of the Grail, our own body, there is a shrine, and within it is to be found the Grail of the heart. We should indeed seek to know and understand that inhabitant. It is the fragment of the Divine contained within each one of us—like the sparks of unfallen creation, which the Gnostics saw entrapped within the flesh of the human envelope. This light shines within each one, and the true quest of the Grail consists in bringing that light to the surface, nourishing and feeding it until its radiance suffuses the world. Chaque homme porte a jamais l’age du son temple—“each man is the same age as his own temple”—wrote the traditionalist philosopher Henri Corbin,142 adding that the completion of the[…]”

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler

“The Temple of Man The image of man is the image of the temple, as writers as disparate as Henry Corbin, Schwaller de Lubicz, Frederic Bligh Bond, and Keith Crichlow have all noted.143 Man must make himself into a temple in order to be inhabited by God. This is the object of all the tests—the Sword Bridge and the turning door, the Perilous Bed and the blinding light of the Grail. The concept begins with the Egypt of the pharaohs, if not earlier, in the caves of humankind’s first dwelling, and it continues through Platonic and Neoplatonic schools of thought. To them the temple was microcosmically an expression of the beauty and unity of creation, seen as a sphere. Expressed thus, it was reflected in the soul and became, indeed, “a bridge for the remembrance or contemplation of the wholeness of creation,”144 words that could be as well applied to the Grail or the divine enclave of which it is a part. This is the origin of the Temple of Light (the haykat al-nur), the macrocosmic temple that lies at the heart of Islamic mysticism, of which the Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabi says: “O ancient temple, there hath risen for you a light that gleams in our hearts”145—the commentary to which states “the gnostic’s heart, which contains the reality of the truth,” is the temple. Here we are back in the world of the Solomonic Grail Temple, the images of which, transformed and altered, together with that of the earthly paradise, were enclosed in the world of the Arthurian Grail mythos. And that world becomes transformed in turn, back into the Edenic world of primal innocence, the original home of the sacred vessel, possession of which “represents the preservation of the primordial tradition in a particular spiritual center”146—the center, that is, of the heart. Ibn al-Arabi wrote that the last true man would be born of the line of Seth, Adam and Eve’s lastborn son.147 Do we not have in this statement a clue to the destiny of the Grail bearer who will come among us at the time of the next “sacring” of the divine vessel? All the Grail knights were followers of Seth—who was the first to go in quest of it—and their adventures are transparent glyphs of the human endeavor to experience the Divine. Most of us, if we found our way into the temple unprepared, would probably suffer the fate of Lancelot. But the Grail Temple exists to show us that the way is worth attempting—that the center can be reached if we are only attentive enough to the message it holds for us.”

• Arthurian Magic, John Matthews, Virginia Chandler