Nor, in these public Folk-ceremonies, these Spring festivals, Dances,
and Plays, is there anything which, on the face of it, appears to
bring them into touch with the central mystery of the Christian
Faith. Yet the men who wrote these romances saw no incongruity in
identifying the mysterious Food-providing Vessel of the
Bleheris-Gawain version with the Chalice of the Eucharist, and in
ascribing the power of bestowing Spiritual Life to that which certain
modern scholars have identified as a Wunsch-Ding, a Folk-tale Vessel
of Plenty.
If there be a mystery of the Grail surely the mystery lies here, in
the possibility of identifying two objects which, apparently, lie at
the very opposite poles of intellectual conception. What brought them
together? Where shall we seek a connecting link? By what road did
the romancers reach so strangely unexpected a goal?
It is, of course, very generally recognized that in the case of most
of the pre-Christian religions, upon the nature and character of whose
rites we possess reliable information, such rites possessed a two-fold
character--exoteric; in celebrations openly and publicly performed,
in which all adherents of that particular cult could join freely,
the object of such public rites being to obtain some external and
material benefit, whether for the individual worshipper, or for
the community as a whole--esoteric; rites open only to a favoured few,
the initiates, the object of which appears, as a rule, to have been
individual rather than social, and non-material.
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