When Rome took over Christianity in 325 AD, the true faith disappeared from public view in the Empire, and might have died out altogether in the West if not for the Crusades. The First Crusade was launched in 1096 CE, but the Crusaders only held their colonies in the east until 1291. However, during the 200 years Europeans had free reign over the Holy Land, a great mix in cultures occurred between east and west, and many strange new ideas, legends, and religious behaviors swept into Europe. One of these was the legend of the Holy Grail, which seems never to have been mentioned in Europe before the Crusades. The great majority of the Grail romances came into existence between 1180 and 1240, and after the last Crusade, nothing new was added to the legend.
The Holy Grail is generally considered to be the chalice Christ drank from at the Last Supper, which Joseph of Arimathea used later to catch blood from Jesus' spear wound on the cross. At the same time, however, it is also supposed to be something very different, a profoundly sacred and mysterious object credited with miraculous properties. It was thought to provide spiritual and physical sustenance, restore youth, heal the sick, provide immortality, and even raise the dead. It was said to provide the highest knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment, allowing one to communicate directly with God. Closely associated with the concept of purity, the Grail was considered so profoundly pure that only the most pure and worthy could approach it. If one was not worthy enough, he could not see the Grail even if he was standing right in front of it.
The quest to find the Holy Grail is one of the most enduring myths in Western culture. The Grail was profoundly mysterious, and the search for it was presented as the highest religious mission one could aspire to. The Grail legend presents an elusive mystery, and until now, no single theory has been able to explain all the details of the legend. Some say the Grail is a real physical object, an ancient relic from Christ's era. Others say that the legend is allegorical, and that the Grail is not a real object at all, but just a mystical concept of spiritual enlightenment. However, when the famous Grail hunter Trevor Ravenscroft claimed to have found the Grail in 1962, he mysteriously maintained that the Grail was somehow both a form of knowledge and also a real object.
The legend of the search for the Holy Grail is particularly associated with King Arthur and his court, who were supposed to have lived around 500 -550 AD, just after the Roman Empire outlawed Original Christianity and drove it underground. In order for Original Christianity to survive in this hostile cultural environment, it could no longer openly and publically declare itself to be an alternate version of Christianity. It could not, for example, use traditional Christian symbols such as the cross or the Ichthys symbol, but had to invent alternate symbols which would pass safely under the cultural radar.
The binary soul doctrine suggests that one of those symbols eventually spawned the entire Grail legend. The Holy Grail, it seems, may have been an underground symbol for Original Christianity. The Grail was, after all, credited with the very same properties ascribed to Christ. The Grail could heal the sick, raise the dead, and provide divine nourishment, knowledge and enlightenment. And like Original Christianity in 500 AD, the Grail was also mysteriously hidden from public view in Arthur's era. One had to diligently search for both the Grail and the Kingdom of Heaven in order to find them, and in each case that search was the highest religious mission, a quest that could provide salvation and eternal life. Like the kingdom of heaven in the Gospel of Thomas, the Grail was something hidden right out in the open, which needed only to be found.
Those still faithful to Original Christianity could no longer publically present their outlawed ideas as Christian, so they had to search for alternate symbols so believers could identify one another without risk. Prior to the advent of Christianity, many ancient BSD cultures used a combination of masculine and feminine symbols to represent their faiths. Some of the most ancient of these used simple circles and straight lines. On the stela known as the Code of Hammurabi, for example, the Babylonian god Marduk is shown holding two large objects in his one hand : a rod and a circle.
These might have been mankind's first truly abstract symbols; they portray exact opposites : one perfectly straight with a beginning and an end, the other perfectly round with no beginning or end. These symbols seem to reflect the Babylonians' awareness of two fundamental, equal but opposite elements in the universe. They may be the earliest symbolic representation of the male and the female, the yin and the yang, the soul and the spirit, the conscious and the unconscious. Marduk holds both symbols in one hand, suggesting that he possesses and controls both, forming what may have been mankind's very first "the-two-made-one" symbol.
Such cultural portrayals of ancient gods holding both a rod and a circle were once common, and even today seem a natural choice for anyone looking for a way to visually symbolize the tenets of the binary soul doctrine. If those loyal to Original Christianity found themselves suddenly searching for a new symbol for their group, they might well have returned to these sorts of earlier representations. However, Original Christianity declared that while we all possess a whole and healthy conscious spirit, our unconscious soul is damaged and incomplete, and it is that part of ourselves that needs healing. This new insight would have required those ancient BSD symbols to be revised to reflect this incompleteness. While the rod would be whole, the circle would have to be incomplete in order to reflect our souls' need for completion. Thus, the new symbol for Christianity after 500 AD might have been a rod and a half-circle.
These two elements could be visually combined together in any number of arrangements , but if one design seemed to produce a particularly pleasing or meaningful image, it would have become the preferred symbol of the underground movement. And as it turns out, one particular alignment of these two elements does produces an image that might have seemed very evocative and meaningful to those early Christians. If our rod and half circle are arranged as shown in this graphic,
they seem to suggest a Grail-like chalice that is half-shrouded in darkness. Even before the legends of the Holy Grail appeared in Europe, Christians would have naturally associated such a chalice symbol with the gospel stories of the last supper, and of Joseph of Arimathea catching Jesus' blood. It would have been a perfect symbol for their hidden faith, an image that simultaneously evoked thoughts of Christ, the Eucharist, and the binary soul doctrine.
Just as the legends declared, such a Grail would have been invisible to the average person. This abstract, stylized symbol only looks like a chalice if one looks at it with that idea already in mind; otherwise, it just looks like a meaningless rod and half-circle. But by looking instead at the empty space and interaction between the rod and circle, the mysterious, half-darkened image of the Holy Grail manifests itself to the viewer's mind. In the same way, the binary soul doctrine declared that neither the soul nor the spirit held the key to salvation, but instead the space and communication between them had to be addressed. And even though the orthodox church had compromised Original Christianity's focus on purity and integrity, the Grail legends had not, maintaining as the ancient Gnostics had done that only the most pure could find this treasure. And just as Original Christianity had gone underground and needed to be sincerely searched for, so too the quest for the Holy Grail became a symbol of the ultimate religious quest.
Was this simple symbol, then, the origin of Europe's legends of the Holy Grail? Those tales mysteriously insisted that the Grail was both a real object and also a source of supernatural knowledge, health, and eternal life. This symbol was indeed all that. As a visual symbol, it was a real object, existing and observable in three-dimensional reality. And yet it also reflected the abstract truths of Original Christianity, which indeed did promise knowledge, enlightenment, and eternal life to its followers.
Was this symbol actually ever used by Christians? We have no evidence that it actually existed during the era of King Arthur. The only historic occurrence of this symbol seems to be in Da Vinci's fifteenth century painting of The Last Supper. However, it stands out like a sore thumb in that painting, the only purely abstract symbol in the whole work.
For centuries, people studying Da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper have been looking in vain for the chalice Christ was supposed to have used at that meal.
Choosing this symbol to represent Original Christianity would have been like saying "Despite what Rome would have you believe, this religion is not merely about faith. It also requires you to stretch your mind, increasing your knowledge and awareness of both yourself and your world. But do not despair, for that goal is not beyond your abilities. In fact, it is as easy and natural as seeing the chalice in this symbol."