CHAPTER XI
The Secret of the Grail (2)
The Naassene Document
We have now seen that the Ritual which, as we have postulated, lies,
in a fragmentary and distorted condition, at the root of our existing
Grail romances, possessed elements capable of assimilation with a
religious system which the great bulk of its modern adherents would
unhesitatingly declare to be its very antithesis. That Christianity
might have borrowed from previously existing cults certain outward
signs and symbols, might have accommodated itself to already existing
Fasts and Feasts, may be, perforce has had to be, more or less
grudgingly admitted; that such a rapprochement should have gone
further, that it should even have been inherent in the very nature of
the Faith, that, to some of the deepest thinkers of old, Christianity
should have been held for no new thing but a fulfilment of the
promise enshrined in the Mysteries from the beginning of the world,
will to many be a strange and startling thought. Yet so it was, and I
firmly believe that it is only in the recognition of this one-time
claim of essential kinship between Christianity and the Pagan
Mysteries that we shall find the key to the Secret of the Grail.
And here at the outset I would ask those readers who are inclined to
turn with feelings of contemptuous impatience from what they deem an
unprofitable discussion of idle speculations which have little or
nothing to do with a problem they hold to be one of purely literary
interest, to be solved by literary comparison and criticism, and by no
other method, to withhold their verdict till they have carefully
examined the evidence I am about to bring forward, evidence which has
never so far been examined in this connection, but which if I am not
greatly mistaken provides us with clear and unmistakable proof of the
actual existence of a ritual in all points analogous to that indicated
by the Grail romances.
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