If our signature calls to us from it's inscription upon the Grail, where then, is the Grail?
Tír na nÓg, Shambala, Avalon, El Dorado, Belovodye
"The center has many names: Mount Meru, Shambhala, Olympus, Asgard. This seat is often placed in a polar region, as in the Greek legend of Hyperborea."
(Tibetan: sbas yul)
"There is a tradition in Tibetan folklore of beyul -- secret or hidden lands, usually described as valleys. The tradition of the Himalayan Buddhist Elders -- the Nyingmapa -- says that Guru Rinpoche empowered 108 of these havens, places where there was peace and prosperity, and spiritual progress was facilitated."
"LJ Ringbom, in his comprehensive Graltempel und Paradies has tried to take up LE Iselin's (Iselin, L. E. Der morgenslandische Ursprung der Grallegende. Halle, 1909)
old hypothesis to show that the idea of the Grail Castle (especially as it is described in the Jungere Titurel came to Europe from Persia, and that this castle or temple — a mandala-shaped structure — represents Paradise, or a spiritual Beyond
whose prototype he sees in the Parsee sanctuary of the holy fire at Siz (Gazak)."
-Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend
"In the Titurel, the legend of the Grail reached its final and splendid transfiguration under the influence of ideas that Wolfram appears to have taken from France, and particularly from the Templars in the south of France. It was no longer in the British Isles but in Gaul on the border of Spain, that the Grail was kept. A hero named Titurel founded a temple in order to deposit the holy Vessel there, and it was the prophet Merlin, initiated by Joseph of Arimathea in person to the plan of the Temple par excellence, the Temple of Solomon, who directed this mysterious construction."
- Henri Martin: Histoire de France, V. III, pp. 398-399
"...at the end of Albrecht von Scharfenberg's great epic, "the New Titurel"... there is an episode which has all the impact of a parable of the Imago Templi. When Titurel and Parsifal take the Holy Grail back to the East, they pass through a certain city. Parsifal leaves the inhabitants of this city with an image of the castle-temple of the Grail at Montsalvat. And with the aid of the single image the inhabitants set about building their own Temple of the Grail...this Image is imperishable, to the extent that we see it rise triumphant in the "waste land", from an earth that is spiritually more devastated than the domain of the Grail ever was before the coming of Parsifal..."
"...the Imago Templi, the image of the castle-temple left to mankind by Parsifal, will never be lost. It is in some sense the response to the geste of Parsifal, and both together are the response to the desperate cry of the Templar knights... Together they reply: No! the temple is not destroyed forever. This was known to Suhravardi also [who]... composed an entire "Book of hours" in honour of the "guardians of the Temple", who are unknown to the majority of men. They guard a secret Temple, and those who find their way to it can join in the invocation which returns, like a refrain, in one of the most beautiful psalms composed by Suhravardi: "O God of every God! Make the litany of the Light arise. Make the people of Light triumphant. Guide the Light towards the Light. Amen."
- Henry Corbin: "The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms," in: Temple and Contemplation, London: KPI, 1986, pp. 389-90.
"Moreover, it is this exalted science of alchemy that Zacharias Werner sees as the secret of the "Valley", the secret which transformed the martyrdom of Jacques de Molay into an ecstatic apotheosis. The Order had but a single aim: the regeneration, the new birth, brought about by the re-establishment of the identity between macrocosm and microcosm. The all-powerfulness of the active Imagination (quite different, as Paracelsus says, from the "fantasy") puts into operation an alchemy which comprises simultaneously a conception of the world, an ethic and eschatology. And this is so whether it is a case of practical alchemy or speculative alchemy: the notion of mediating and mediation is the very foundation of the Ars magna. The philosopher's stone is to be found only through the coincidentia oppositorum, and this coincidentia can occur only through a mediatory term and on a mediating level (the level, as the Islamic theosophers say, "where bodies are spiritualized and where spirits take on body"). Mercury both engenders and reabsorbs contraries, and it is also one of the names for the Stone of the Sages. This stone has the power to destroy gross matter and to convert the body of man into a subtle body of luminous essence, like the bodies of the Righteous in Paradise, or the body of the androgynous Adam before his Fall. The active Imagination is the organ of meditation that assimilates the Opus alchemicum, by which base metal is refined. In virtue of this assimilation, the Imagination is the mediator which brings about the refinement of whoever "spiritualizes himself until he reaches the final stage of mystical union."
- ibid
"...the rotunda of the Temple of the Grail at Mount Salvat, in the New Titurel contains 72 chapels all around the centre - the sanctuary of the Grail)"
"Mundus Imaginalis... Like the domain of the Grail, it is an interworld that is self-sufficient."
-Henri Corbin: Imaginal Worlds and Utopia
"The following passages from Proclus' Theology of Plato, however, will throw further light on this interesting subject. Thus the Demiurgus is said to 'constitute the psychical essences in conjunction with the Crater' (V.xxxi)--this in the Sensible World. Again, 'the Crater is the peculiar cause of souls, and is co-arranged with the Demiurgus and filled from him, but fills souls'. Thus the Crater is called the 'fountain of souls', the 'cause of souls' "
-G. R. S. Mead: The Orphic Pantheon
"P. Wapnewski, Wolfram's Parzival,... points out similarities between the ideas advanced in the Grail poems and those of the Fedeli d'Amore and Hermetic tradition."
-Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend, 1970
""Why then, my father, did God not distribute Mind to all?
He willed, my son, to set it before souls as a prize that they might win.
And where did he set it? He filled a great bowl with it and set it down.
He provided a herald and ordered him to proclaim to the hearts of men
the following message. Dip yourself, you who can, into this bowl,
you who believe that you will ascend to him who sent the bowl down,
you who know for what purpose you have come into being.
Those therefore who have understood the proclamation and dipped
themselves in Mind partook of gnosis and became perfect men, since they
received Mind. But those who ignored the proclamation, these are the
logikoi, who have not received Mind in addition (to Reason) and do not know
for what purpose they have come into being, or from what source.""
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3. Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed,
but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not
from Him, but hath its place below, within the souls of men who
have no Mind.
Tat: Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind?
H: He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls,
just as it were a prize.
4. T: And where hath He set it up?
H: He filled a mighty Cup with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it],
to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men:
Baptize thyself with this Cup's baptism, what heart can do so, thou that hast
faith thou canst ascend to him that hath sent down the Cup, thou that dost know
for what thoudidst come into being!
As many then as understood the Herald's tidings and doused themselves in Mind,
became partakers in the Gnosis; and when they had "received the Mind"
they were made "perfect men".
But they who do not understand the tidings, these, since they possess
the aid of Reason [only] and not Mind, are ignorant wherefor they have
come into being and whereby.
5. The senses of such men are like irrational creatures'; and as their
[whole] make-up is in their feelings and their impulses, they fail in all
appreciation of
These center all their thought upon the pleasures of the body and its appetites,
in the belief that for its sake man hath come into being.
But they who have received some portion of God's gift, these,
Tat, if we judge by their deeds, have from Death's bonds won their release;
for they embrace in their own Mind all things, things on the earth,
things in the heaven, and things above the heaven - if there be aught.
And having raised themselves so far they sight the Good; and having sighted it,
they look upon their sojourn here as a mischance; and in disdain of all,
both things in body and the bodiless, they speed their way unto that
One and Only One.
6. This is, O Tat, the Gnosis of the Mind, Vision of things Divine; God-knowledge is it,
for the Cup is God's.
T: Father, I, too, would be baptized.
- Corpus Hermeticum, IV. The Cup or Monad, 1906 translated by G.R.S. Mead
From the cradle to the grave
There are roads for us all
that we'll find, and follow to the end
Leading upwards to a place in the stars,
ten million miles away...
There's a path called Tenemos Roads
Everything happening there is history,
records of ages before we were born.
But the sound of men in battle makes me cry
out in my dreams. ..
I will build a home on Tenemos Roads
I will build a home on Tenemos Roads
-Dave Stewart: TENEMOS ROADS
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