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The Cauldron of the God
. S. Loomis drew attention to certain similarities between the lance of the
Grail castle and the spear that appears in the tale of the Irish hero Brian, from the Fate of the Children of Turenn.
eltic mythology is full of magic vessels. Another of the Four Treasures was the cauldron (coire) of the Dagda,
which never ran dry and from which no one ever went away unsatisfied.
Just as the food and drink of mortals supports human life, so in mythology the food and drink of the
otherworld supports the immortal life and eternal youth of its inhabitants. Zeus and the Greek gods lived on the nectar and ambrosia of immortality. The Norse
gods ate the apples of Idun, which kept them for ever young. The Irish god Goibniu brewed beer in a cauldron for the otherworld feast which preserved the Tuatha
Dé Danaan, the Irish deities, from ageing and death. The Dagda's inexhaustible cauldron could bring the dead back to life... the Welsh god Brân owned a cauldron
which reanimated dead warriors who were placed in it...
If the Grail is descended from otherworld vessels of this kind — not from any one of them in particular but from the idea of them — then
it too should be connected with regeneration and eternal life. There is already a hint that it is, when the banquet is served to Perceval
and the Fisher King. The table on which the food is placed is made of ivory, resting on trestles of ebony, and we are specifically told that ebony last for ever,
because it does not rot and cannot burn. There would be no point in this comment [by the poet Chrétien] unless it is meant to suggest
that the scene in the castle has something to do with immortality, or 'lasting for ever'. 
[Richard Cavendish, King Arthur and the Grail.]
t is possible that in his last opera Parsifal, Richard Wagner was reviving (consciously or unconsciously)
a tradition that was older than the Grail romances in which he had found some of his raw material. The complementary relics of the Grail
and the Spear as they appear in the opera are not only linked but drawn towards each other. It might even be said that these strange
hallows in some way direct the action of the opera: at one point, Wagner's protagonist Parsifal says that he heard the Grail call out to him, asking the hero to save it from hands stained with sin. It is only when Parsifal holds the
Spear in his hand that he knows that it belongs with the Grail, that he has a mission, and that his mission is to
reunite the two of them.
agner's Grail is not a cauldron and neither were the Grails of the romances: in some cases
a cup, in Wolfram a stone, and in other texts not clearly defined but a vessel larger than a cup. It is striking that Wagner's Spear starts to bleed only when it is in the presence of the Grail; in the last lines of the opera, the hero describes the
yearning of the Spear for the blood that flows in the Grail. Here there is a reference to
the interpretation of these objects as Christian relics: the blood that flows from the Spear into the Grail is the
divine blood. For Wagner this was the essence of free-willed suffering, which in some mystical way he saw as the only hope for a regeneration of mankind.
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© Derrick Everett 1996-2018. This page last updated (more new styles) --- Tue 11 December 2018 23:10 CET ---
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