The Holy Grail of Grail Stories – Tablet Magazine
I was raised without much in the way of religion, filmmaker Jeff Reichert wrote in a post about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Reverse Shot, the magazine for the Museum of the Moving Image. For the longest time, a simple cup that I saw in a movie fixed for me an entire vision of the Christian religion. Reichert probably isn t the only person for whom this was (and is) the case. He goes on to marvel that the Holy Grail became an idea so potent in that culturally dominant collection of tales we call Christianity that it has, over time, achieved the status of widely employed secular metaphor (X item is the Holy Grail of Y field/search/ambition, etc.), even though it doesn t appear in the Christian Bible at all. Moreover, despite being the Western folklore tradition s ultimate MacGuffin, there was never a genuine cult around the cup used at the Last Supper, the way, for example, many Christians even today venerate relics believed to have belonged to or been touched by holy people. Nevertheless, the Grail has its champions, who insist that it had at least great symbolic meaning, somewhere in ancient times. Like Arthur himself, the once and future king, the Grail speaks to the preoccupations of the present by reaching back to a remote past.