The earliest version of the Grail story, represented by our Bleheris
form, relates the visit of a wandering knight to one of these hidden
temples; his successful passing of the test into the lower grade of
Life initiation, his failure to attain to the highest degree. It
matters little whether it were the record of an actual, or of a possible,
experience; the casting into romantic form of an event which the
story-teller knew to have happened, had, perchance, actually witnessed;
or the objective recital of what he knew might have occurred; the
essential fact is that the mise-en-scene of the story, the
nomenclature, the march of incident, the character of the tests,
correspond to what we know from independent sources of the details of
this Nature Ritual. The Grail Quest was actually possible then, it is
actually possible to-day, for the indication of two of our romances as
to the final location of the Grail is not imagination, but the record
of actual fact.
As first told the story preserved its primal character of a composite
between Christianity and the Nature Ritual, as witnessed by the
ceremony over the bier of the Dead Knight, the procession with Cross
and incense, and the solemn Vespers for the Dead. This, I suspect,
correctly represents the final stage of the process by which
Attis-Adonis was identified with Christ.
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