Part 1: The Holy Grail Two Ways

In 1982, approximately one hundred years after the premiere of Richard Wagner's final music-drama, Parsifal, two books on the Holy Grail were published and put forth different arguments concerning the Grail's potential symbolic meaning. These monographs interpreted much of the same evidence— the medieval romances by authors such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Grail's pre-Christian origins, and the Grail's endurance as a concept of mythical lore to the present day. The two books, however, came to starkly different conclusions.

The first book is Trevor Ravenscroft's The Cup of Destiny, a sequel to the author's investigation of The Spear of Destiny from 1972. Ravenscroft is a researcher of all things mystic, esoteric, and occult. Much of his argument hinges on interpreting Grail romances, and even Wagner's own adaptation, through the avenues of historical exoteric and esoteric thought and their twentieth-century legacies, particularly the German revival of occult interests during the Second World War. Ravenscroft comes from a branch of esotericism that finds in the Holy Grail the source of inner divinity and enlightenment.

The second book is The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, a research group with a much greater interest in peddling historical controversy. The Holy Blood authors expand on the work of Ravenscroft and others, but they have loftier ambitions for their esoteric thesis. Their argument relates the occult fascination with the Grail to the historical Jesus, and they conclude that the Holy Grail is not a physical object such as a cup or a bowl, but, in fact, a symbol of Jesus's bloodline—or more accurately, a literary stand-in for the womb of Mary Magdalene. According to the authors, the two produced a family tree that would later rule most of Europe as the Merovingian dynasty, the “longhaired monarchs” capable of miraculous spiritual deeds. This thesis has since become a well-known conspiracy theory, especially in the United States, where it received its most popular iterations in Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code and its 2008 film adaptation.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that one hundred years after Wagner's own Grail opera there should arise two different interpretations of the Holy Grail, its literature, and its “true” meaning—one relying on esoteric knowledge and the other, alleged pseudohistory and conspiracy.