In the Attis feast the initiates actually ate and drank from
these vessels; in the romances the Grail community never actually eat
from the Grail itself, but the food is, in some mysterious and
unexplained manner, supplied by it. In both cases it is a
Lebens-Speise, a Food of Life. This point is especially insisted upon
in the Parzival, where the Grail community never become any older than
they were on the day they first beheld the Talisman.[19] In the Attis
initiation the proof that the candidate has successfully passed the
test is afforded by the revival of the god--in the Grail romances the
proof lies in the healing of the Fisher King.
Thus, while deferring for a moment any insistence on the obvious
points of parallelism with the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and the
possibilities of Spiritual teaching inherent in the ceremonies,
necessary links in our chain of argument, we are, I think, entitled to
hold that, even when we pass beyond the outward mise-en-scene of the
story--the march of incident, the character of the King, his title,
his disability, and relation to his land and folk--to the inner and
deeper significance of the tale, the Nature Cults still remain
reliable guides; it is their inner, their esoteric, ritual which
will enable us to bridge the gulf between what appears at first sight
the wholly irreconcilable elements of Folk-tale and high Spiritual
mystery.
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