GRAIL CONTRA CROSS

Essays, GRAAL

The Holy Grail and Europe’s Suppressed Faith

“Once upon a time.” 

This is the common phrase used in works of fantasy, and it is the classic opener for any good bedtime story. However, for the purposes of this brief, exploratory essay, “once upon a time” references the mere facts of history. For example, once upon a time, Margaret Murray (1863-1963) was a best-selling author whose idiosyncratic assertions about the origins of Early Modern witchcraft were once taken seriously. Murray’s work, specifically her monograph, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), was talked about in the same breath as Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough. She was a fixture in the pulp magazines as well, with authors like Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) and H.P. Lovecraft frequently referencing The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and its ideas in their shuddersome stories: 

“He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches’ Sabbaths.”1

The core ideas of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe provide the perfect fodder for weird literature. Murray believed, and supported with evidence, that pre-Christian rites lingered in medieval Europe. When the Inquisition left the cities and journeyed into the countryside, they were shocked to see evidence of devotions to supposedly long-dead gods like Pan, Diana, and Herne the Hunter. For Murray and her students, the witchcraft craze of the Early Modern epoch, which saw hundreds of thousands of suspected witches and warlocks hanged, drowned, or burnt at the stake, was the result of Christianity finally conquering Europe—all of Europe—after centuries of slow, top-down acquisition. The idea that witchcraft represents a continuity with Europe’s ancient customs is still very much alive within Wiccan practices, with the first modern Wiccan, Gerald Brousseau Gardner (1884-1964), being a disciple of Murray’s hypothesis. Indeed, in 1951, Gardner, a former tea plantation manager, announced to the world via the British press that the Neolithic fertility cult of Murray’s book was still alive and well, and that he was its new spiritual leader.2

The succeeding years have not been too kind to Miss Murray’s hypothesis. Although praised as a pioneering feminist and a learned scholar of Egyptology, Murray has been excoriated over the years for engaging in sensationalism backed up by paltry evidence. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, by far and away her most famous work, is usually panned by academics and critics as a work of quasi-scholarly flim-flam—an attempt to simultaneously defend the persecuted and give credence to the worst fears of the witchfinders. There really was an alternative religion to Christianity, you see, and its roots stretch all the way back into prehistory. 

“What a load of bunk,” shouts the chorus of respectable opinion since the 1960s (or even earlier). A contemporary graduate student would likely find a cold and unreceptive audience in 2026 if they approached one of their advisors with the idea that Murray was not only right but deserves renewed appreciation. Such a suggestion would be canned faster than stale sardines. 

And yet, one writer, the Italian Carlo Ginzburg (1939- ), is respected in the halls of academe despite pretty much saying the exact same thing as Murray. One of his seminal works, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,3 takes the stance that there existed in sixteenth century Italy (specifically in the northeastern region of Friuli) a sect of women who not only practiced fertility rites in the name of the Greco-Roman goddess Diana,4 but who also used hallucinogens to conduct nighttime battles against evil forces on the astral plane as good witches (the benandanti) to assure bountiful harvests. The suppression of Friuli’s good witches, along with the suppression of werewolves in Livonia and the irascible miller Menocchio,5 was all part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation’s program of standardizing folk Catholic practices and eliminating any traces of pre-Christian rituals to weaken Protestant accusations of the Catholic Church’s toleration of heresy, blasphemy, and idol worship. There did exist an underground of heterodox beliefs among the rural peasantry, Ginzburg claims, and most of these beliefs contain more than a passing whiff of paganism. 

The existence of a non-Christian, or at least non-traditional Christian faith in medieval and Early Modern Europe is further evidenced by the object known as the Holy Grail. Remembered in the popular imagination as Jesus’s drinking cup from the Last Supper, the Holy Grail, also known as the Gral or the Graal, was during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries a serious threat to the Vatican. The Church did its best to suppress popular enthusiasm for the Grail, and the troubadours who sang about courtly love and knightly quests for the holy relic did not find a receptive audience in Rome or among her clergy. Especially during the height of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), when the Gnostic Cathars of Languedoc were rooted out and killed by the armies of the Pope and Paris, the Grail was held as an object contra to Christianity—a mystical totem of a belief system that was purer, more democratic, and more esoteric than the exoteric and corrupt beliefs sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. 

But what was the Grail if not Jesus’s chalice? Some authors have argued that the Holy Grail was the original philosopher’s stone, which was a jewel that fell from the crown of Lucifer the Light-Bringer after the failure of his rebellion against Yahweh. Others have staked the position that the Holy Grail was not an object at all, but rather the holy bloodline of Jesus himself, which was carried to Roman Gaul (specifically Languedoc in the south) by Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea.6 The spear that pierced Jesus’s side and the magical cauldron of Celtic mythology have also been suggested as the true Holy Grail. However, the Grail’s substance, if it exists or ever existed at all, is secondary to what it represents. 

The three authors discussed in this essay—Murray, Otto Rahn, and Julius Evola—all believed that the Grail held tremendous power and represented rites and rituals much older than Christianity. For Murray, the Holy Grail was part of an older tradition that began in Ancient Egypt that was transported to England, specifically Glastonbury.7 Murray’s vision of the Grail is no different than her vision of witchcraft, i.e., both were part and parcel of a pagan past. Otto Rahn (1904-1939) on the other hand wrote of the Grail as connected to the indigenous customs of Languedoc. The Grail and its Cathar protectors belonged to the Nordic and Hyperborean tradition, according to Rahn, and as such, the war against the Grail was nothing less than a racial struggle between pure Germanics and a bastardized, cosmopolitan, and Mediterranean faith. Finally, for Evola, who agreed with many of the same racialist theories as Rahn, the Grail’s ultimate power was as a symbol for the universal empire and its chief monarch. Evola’s Ghibelline Grail threatened the Catholic crucifix both spiritually and politically, for the Grail carried within its being the essence of Roman imperialism, specifically pagan imperialism and the figure of the pontifex maximus.  

A synthesis of all three ideas can exist, for all three argue for the continuation of Europe’s pagan beliefs and practices against the cloying conformity of Catholicism. However, I will not present a synthesis here. Instead, this small essay shall present each idea separately and invite the reader to muse over the possibilities themselves. 

The Nilotic Grail 

Murray’s interest in the literature of the Holy Grail began sometime in 1915. In that year, Murray, then working for University College London as a lecturer and unofficial administrator for the UCL’s Egyptology Department, found herself convalescing in Glastonbury, an area steeped in Grail myths and legends. Murray immersed herself in these ideas and, combining them with her extensive expertise in archaeology and Egyptology, produced an essay for the journal Ancient Egypt entitled “Egypt in the Grail Romance” (1916). This essay is one of Murray’s earliest forays into the study of folklore, and as a folklorist, Murray would later undertake her research for The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.8

“Egypt in the Grail Romance” primarily revolves around the figure of Joseph of Arimathea, whom tradition holds fled Roman Palestine for Gaul, where he was baptized by St. Philip and given instructions to convert Britain to the cross.9 Murray mentions that multiple versions of Joseph’s flight from the Middle East to Europe exist, but all agree that Joseph arrived in Gaul as both a pagan and the keeper of the Grail. Furthermore, as Murray notes in her essay, Roman Egypt is the setting for the majority of the action in every version of the Joseph of Arimathea tale.10 Yet, the Joseph of Arimathea legends speak of Egypt and England, and for Murray, this is indicative of cross-cultural transmission. 

Ancient Egyptians knew about the existence of Britain. This is historical fact, not conjecture. Britain, specifically Cornwall and Devon, produced tin for Ancient Egypt and other Bronze Age civilizations.11 Extensive trade networks connected Europe’s northern fringe with the Mediterranean, and thus it is not inconceivable that Ancient Egyptian sailors may have journeyed to Britain and vice versa.12 “Egypt in the Grail Romance” argues that this relationship ran deeper than economic ties. Murray argues that the Egyptian religion informed its Brythonic and Celtic counterparts, even going so far as to provide the Celts with Egyptian deities. Avalloch, the Celtic lord of the dead, bears a resemblance to Evalach, the King of Sarras in the Grail legends of Joseph of Arimathea.13 Furthermore, it is not a linguistic leap to see Avalloch as the progenitor of Avalon, the Grail’s idyllic, almost Elysian home in Arthurian legends.14 

Murray compounds her argument by dissecting the many names associated with both the Arthurian legends and the Joseph of Arimathea stories. This exhaustive exercise is done for the purpose of underscoring Murray’s core conceit, which is that the mythology of the Holy Grail began in Egypt and was thereafter transported to Europe. Even Merlin, King Arthur’s necromancer and chief sorcerer, comes from the Arabic Melkites, or “King’s men,” and one of the earliest Christian communities in the world.15 Murray also notes that Wolfram von Eschenbach, the great German epic poet and Minnesinger, whose chivalric romance, Parzival, figures so strongly in the history of the Holy Grail and the works of Rahn and Evola, wrote that his inspiration came from an Arabic manuscript found in Toledo, Spain.16 The manuscript of Kyot (von Eschenbach’s instructor in all matters concerning the Holy Grail) indicates that the Grail originated in the Middle East, with the first Grail legends appearing after the Islamic conquests. However, Murray suggests that Islamic scholars in Damascus and Alexandria did not write the Grail tales themselves, but rather transcribed even older Egyptian tales.17 In turn, the Arthurian legends represent Celtic modifications of an Ancient Egyptian myth, with the geography of the Nile Delta being reinterpreted as Avalon.18 Murray even goes so far as to state that Joseph of Arimathea and his retinue of proselytizers were buried in Roman Britain. 

“Egypt in the Grail Romance” is not often compared to Murray’s later, more sensationalist work, and yet the links are there. Murray’s first foray into the study of folklore articulates the notion that Old Europe was more interconnected, more fluid, and more open to different religious currents (including foreign cults, chief of which was Early Christianity) than previously believed. The core argument made in “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” that the Holy Grail and associated myths have a Near Eastern, primarily Egyptian origin, is similar to the later witch-cult hypothesis, which posits that all esoteric practices come from Neolithic fertility rites. The witches keeping their customs alive is no different than the Arthurian romances maintaining the flame for a Nilotic tradition, and in keeping with Murray’s oeuvre, the interconnected streams of myth and history may be occulted, but they continue to run all the same. 

Lucifer’s Court 

Murray’s “Egypt in the Grail Romance” claims, almost like a passing remark of little importance, that the god Appollin, whom “Christian martyrs were often ordered to sacrifice,” is the Arabic reinterpretation of the Ancient Greek god, Apollo.19 Apollo, in turn, is often figured as the Grecian version of Horus, the Ancient Egyptian god of wisdom. The Horus/Apollo deity has a complex relationship with Christianity. For some of a more conspiratorial bent, Horus is seen as the original Christ, whose birth from a virgin mother and position as the savior of mankind, prefigures the arrival of Jesus.20 In this view, the Early Christians co-opted the myth of Horus, which was well-known and well-established in the Near East, in order to gain converts to their new faith. 

Conversely, Horus/Apollo appears in the Bible in the Book of Revelation as the angel of the Abyss known as Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek.21 If Jesus is the reimagining of Horus, then Lucifer is the Christian interpretation of Apollo/Apollyon. Apollo the Light Bringer existed as the lord of this world for the Greeks,22 and with the coming of Emperor Augustus, who dedicated his house and career to the god’s glory, Apollo was established in the Eternal City as a deity and cult inseparable from Roman imperium.23 For pagans, Apollo was the avatar of human genius, knowledge, wisdom, and the search for things greater than the mere material realm. For Christians, Apollo represented pride and humanity’s eternal drive to usurp the Lord’s will. For the heretical Cathars, Apollo/Lucifer was the great misunderstood. He was Lucibel (also spelled Luzifer)—the greatest of all angels and Christ’s equal who was unjustly usurped by Jesus.24 The Cathars followed in the Christian tradition by branding Lucibel as prideful and overconfident, but unlike their Catholic neighbors, the Cathars believed that the Light-Bringer would humble himself before God on the Day of Judgement.25

Before going deeper into Cathar theology, we must first establish Catharism itself. Like Murray’s Egyptian Grail, the origins of Catharism lie in the East. Catharism (and England’s Lollard faith) most likely derived from the Bogomils, a secretive sect of Gnostic Christians founded by a Bulgarian priest named Bogomil in the 10th century.26 The Bogomils held that Satanael was God’s first-born son and his chief lieutenant until, filled with pride, Satanael gathered one-third of Heaven’s angels in his rebellion against God. Merciful in victory, God allowed his son, now known as Satan after his defeat, to create his own world. This world became our Earth, and its architect made men and women from clay and injected them with the spirits of his fallen angel comrades.27 With one explanation, the Bogomils managed to solve a riddle that continues to bedevil Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians alike: evil exists in this world because the benevolent God had no hand in creating it. 

To the Bogomils and later Cathars, rejecting our sinful world became the path to perfection. Both became noted for abstaining from meat, wearing simple clothing, and even rejecting sexual intercourse as unclean. Both also denied church hierarchy, gender-separate institutions, and the existence of Purgatory.28 Neither faith built churches, and most profound of all, both the Bogomils and the Cathars refused to use or wear the cross. Otto Rahn took note of this, and after spending years in Southern France studying the history and theology of the Cathars, he concluded that they replaced the Christian cross with the sign of the Holy Grail. And rather than spread the gospel via priests, Rahn’s Cathars embedded their faith in poetry and song and dispatched troubadours across Europe to spread the good news. 

Otto Rahn was one of history’s greatest chroniclers of the Holy Grail, and yet his name (like Murray’s) is never spoken by serious scholars or academics. One explanation for this is that Rahn was not a professional academic29 and frequently indulged in pseudo-scientific theories. The more obvious explanation for Rahn’s dismissal however lies with the fact that he was a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), a close associate of Heinrich Himmler, and an officer in the Allgemeine SS tasked with rediscovering the Aryan history of Europe. To this end, Rahn injected racialist ideas into his second book on the Grail, entitled Lucifer’s Court (1937). 

More of a travelogue than a historical monograph, Lucifer’s Court summarizes the history and theology of the Cathars of Languedoc by envisioning them as the inheritors and keepers of occulted Aryan myths that were born in the ancient Far North (Hyperborea). Rahn interprets Apollo not as the Christian Lucifer, but rather as the Cathar Lucibel whose original home was in Hyperborea, or the land of the Midnight Sun.30 Rahn further asserts that Apollo’s true nature was as Apollo-Amor, or the god of love, spring, and the sun. The inclusion of “Amor” matters, for as noted in all Rahn’s works on the Holy Grail, the Cathars and the troubadours both spoke frequently of amor—a non-carnal form of love and spiritual loyalty that was popularized as courtly love by the Provençal troubadours, who referred to themselves as chantres d’amor.31 This is a radical reimagining of medieval culture, for it argues that the genius of the eleventh and twelfth centuries—Arthurian romances, troubadours and Minnesingers, Grail myths—all belonged to an esoteric, Gnostic, and contra-Christian counterculture that the Roman Catholic Church actively suppressed until eradication. In Lucifer’s Court, Rahn expounds upon this suppression in racial terms, i.e., the Aryan-Nordic Cathars, whose philosophy stretched back to Hyperborea, fell victim to the cruelty of the Vatican, which was nothing less than the degenerative remnant of the racially mixed and culturally confused Late Roman Empire.  

Rahn’s first work on the Holy Grail, Crusade Against the Grail (1934), is noticeably less boisterous about race and the racialist elements supposedly hidden in the history of the Albigensian Crusade.32 Crusade Against the Grail instead pays closer attention to the socio-political realities of the Church’s war against the Cathars. The Albigensian Crusade, which reached its fiery nadir after Catholic forces captured the Cathar stronghold of Château de Montségur33 in 1242, effectively ended the autonomy of the County of Toulouse, the County of Foix, the Viscounty of Carcassonne, and the other Provençal realms that protected Catharism. The Catholic victory in the Albigensian Crusade was an even greater victory for the Kingdom of France, which, in the thirteenth century, controlled Paris and crown dependencies mostly in the north and north-central areas of the country. Paris’s victory against the Cathars began the slow conquest of langues d’oc by the tongue and culture of langues d’oïl. The last great gasp of Languedoc and her people came in the proliferation of Grail romances and courtly poetry, both of which practically vanished by the late thirteenth century. 

Rahn’s Holy Grail, unlike Murray’s Egyptian configuration, is a thoroughly European object. He connects the Grail to a litany of cultures—the Cathars of Languedoc, the Arian Visigoths that controlled Iberia and parts of France during the fifth and sixth centuries A.D.,34 and the Knights Templar. Further afield, Rahn sees the Holy Grail as a symbol of the Luciferian thirst for greater knowledge and greatness itself, and the hidden history and religion of Hyperborea. Rahn’s declaration of his own heresy—his own alignment with Luciferianism—is, in essence, a declaration of war against the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in favor of resurrecting Europe’s suppressed faith. Had the Nazis won World War II, the Holy Grail may have become the animating symbol of National Socialist imperium. After all, within the history and cosmology of SS officer Rahn (and by extension the worldview of Himmler), the Grail represented one part of the deliberately hidden and suppressed history of Aryan Europe, with her pagan deities and Hyperborean rites, by the foreign and Judaic theology of the Roman Catholic Church.  

The Hidden Emperor 

Of all the authors profiled in this essay, Julius Evola (1898-1974) is the one whose work is still widely discussed, read, and, most frequently of all, denounced. Evola briefly flirted with Futurism and the avant-garde Left after serving as an artillery officer during World War I. Thereafter, Evola became the grand occultist and chief magickian of Italian Traditionalism. During the fascist era, Evola was a member of the influential UR Group, which was a gathering of Italian pagans, occultists, and Freemasons, and a prolific journalist and writer. Evola’s crowning achievement, Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), is still the best summation of his political and spiritual worldview. The book is a clarion call against democracy, Christianity, egalitarianism, Americanism, etc. in favor of a revival of the Roman Empire, Roman paganism, and imperium whereby the godhead monarch becomes the material and spiritual leader of the race. Although popular with the Conservative Revolution movement in Germany, and a general supporter of Italian Fascism and Benito Mussolini, Evola was something of an eternal misfit, and he frequently criticized Mussolini’s government. Evola had nothing but disdain for the populism of fascism, and he similarly hated the socialist ideology that was the radix, or root, of Italian Fascism. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which recognized an independent Vatican City and formalized relations between the Kingdom of Italy and the pope, was unforgivable for Evola. The pact ruined Evola’s great hope for fascism, which was as the initiatory vehicle for the future recreation of a pagan empire in Europe. 

More than politics, Evola’s work predominately focuses on Western esotericism. The Mystery of the Grail, which was first published as an appendix to Revolt Against the Modern World, is within this tradition. The Mystery of the Grail is a primer and explainer about the hidden, occulted meanings behind the Holy Grail. Echoing Rahn, The Mystery of the Grail articulates the idea of the Grail as a non-Christian, pagan object that was suppressed by the Catholic Church because its mere image invokes Europe’s ancient past. Evola and Rahn agree on much, and it would be redundant to list all these agreements. Of greater interest are Evola’s singular contributions to Grail studies, and no contribution is more curious than his belief that the Holy Grail of the Middle Ages symbolizes the “awaited, hidden emperor.”35

To support this claim, Evola points out the high number of kings and emperors from late antiquity and the medieval world who are said to be awaiting a return to power from a condition of stasis in some hidden cave or castle: King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Emperor Frederick I and Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire.36 Evola compares these myths with the Dry Tree belief that Marco Polo brought back to Europe from his journeys in Asia. The Persian story of the Dry Tree, which reportedly marks the battlespace once shared by Alexander the Great (avatar of Europa) and King Darius (avatar of the Orient), will blossom again when a “new imperial manifestation” of the Universal Ruler arrives to defeat the forces of the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga.37 Evola saw the pagan Universal Ruler as the traditional “king of kings” who is spiritually opposed to Christianity, which was of the Dark Age.38

The key to understanding the Universal Ruler concept as it relates to Evola’s interpretation of the Holy Grail lies in the history of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. In short, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Italy’s many city-states, free communes, and duchies saw constant warfare between rival factions. On the one side were the Guelphs, who supported the Vatican and the temporal power of the pope in civil affairs. The Ghibellines, on the other hand, supported the Holy Roman Empire and power of the German emperor in temporal and spiritual matters (the ability to name bishops and cardinals, for example). In Evola’s rendering, Guelphism is theocratic and runs counter to the “primordial tradition of ‘regal’ spirituality” invested in a sovereign.39 Ironically, Evola saw in Guelphism an early movement towards the separation of church and state, with the pro-Vatican Guelphs seeking greater autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire vis-à-vis the mechanism of a strengthened but (hopefully) politically aloof pope. 

The Ghibellines offered a different vision. Ghibellinism offered the medieval world “the reappearance of the sacred and spiritual…ideal of the authority befitting a leader of a traditional political organization.”40 In supporting the authority of the German emperors, the Italian Ghibellines recognized the holy and dual nature of kingship as temporal sovereignty and spiritual imperium all at once. The Ghibelline ideal is nothing less than the return of the Roman pontifex maximus. 

For Evola, this was the legacy of the Grail and its adherents, such as the Knights Templar, who represented the initiatory traditions of Western esotericism and associated Luciferian Gnosticism. The Grail symbol eradicates the separation between warrior and priest and similarly recasts faith and loyalty as the Luciferian will to power.41 Again, as in the work of Rahn, Evola’s Holy Grail is the antithesis of the Christian Cross, and represents older European traditions of divine kingship, sacred knighthood, mystery religions, secret traditions, and imperium.42 The proliferation and bastardization of Grail-adjacent rites, from Freemasonry to the Bavarian Illuminati, speaks to a deeper desire within the European soul to reclaim older traditions and resurrect lost kings. 

Final Thoughts

The popular imagination casts the Holy Grail as an object of great Christian veneration. It is the ultimate relic housed the world’s most inaccessible reliquary. This view is at odds with the historical record, for the medieval Roman Catholic Church actively worked against the veneration of the Holy Grail and the spread of its many romances. A moderate, sober-minded interpretation of the Holy Grail would argue that it was a folk belief that spread quickly via the many arts of the time. The Church’s suppression of the Grail was akin to the Church’s suppression of non-canonical saints, especially the multitude of local saints that abounded in rural Europe prior to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. 

This interpretation sounds true enough, but it feels unfulfilling. As shown by the works of Murray, Rahn, and Evola, medieval Europe, which birthed and fostered the symbol of the Holy Grail, did not exist under a total Roman Catholic hegemony. Heterodox beliefs, from folk Catholicism to proto-Protestant heresies and Gnostic faiths like Catharism, flourished widely, with Languedoc being a noticeably active center of contra-Catholic beliefs. It is not ridiculous or conspiracy-minded to suggest that a subterranean religion or religions existed in Europe before the coming of the Reformation. Whether this religion was Neolithic in origin (as Murray suggests) or the product of an ancient Aryan civilization (as articulated by Rahn), suppressed elements of paganism may have coalesced with Gnostic Christian practices and theology to form a powerful resistance to Roman Catholicism. In the case of the Albigensian Crusade, this spiritual resistance was inseparable from armed resistance in the name of ancient customs and regional autonomy. For Northern Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth century, resistance meant fighting, either consciously or unconsciously, for the return of the kind of monarch not seen in Europe since the days of pagan Rome. 

The Holy Grail thus can be seen as the ultimate contra-Christian symbol—the bright, Luciferian object representing a refutation of Christendom and the exoteric world it created. The fact that the Kingdom of France and the Vatican won in Languedoc, the Guelphs triumphed in Italy, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation forever standardized Christian practices in Europe (and, by extension, set the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment by further disconnecting spiritual and temporal rule) means that the Grail lost to the cross. As a result, the true meaning of the Holy Grail is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. But, as this essay has hopefully demonstrated, antiquity and older rites lay at the heart of the Grail’s existence, and those still seeking the Graal must look beyond the confines of orthodox history and acceptable beliefs.

  1. Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 34.
  2. Francis Young, “The Woman Who Inspired Wicca,” First Things, Aug. 25, 2020, https://firstthings.com/the-woman-who-inspired-wicca/.
  3. First published in Italy as I benandanti in 1966. 
  4. More than Lucifer himself, the goddess Diana was named by medieval and Early Modern jurists as the “goddess of the pagans.” Accused witches and warlocks frequently wrote in their confessions about carrying out rites in the name of Diana and worshipping the nature deity in sacred groves. For more information, see Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 168-169.
  5. Menocchio, or Domenico Scandella (1532-1599), was a miller in Friuli who was convicted of heresy by the Roman Inquisition for his idiosyncratic beliefs about the nature of the cosmos, along with his objections to Catholic dogma. For more information, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992).
  6. This is the belief of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), a classic of conspiracy literature first published in 1982. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail took on a second life as the primary inspiration for Dan Brown’s blockbuster thriller, The Da Vinci Code (2003).
  7. Glastonbury is commonly seen as the real counterpart to the legendary Avalon of Arthurian romances.
  8. Murray had no formal training as a folklorist, as Egyptology made up the bulk of her formal studies. This fact is often invoked by critics of her witch-cult hypothesis.
  9. Margaret Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” Ancient Egypt, Part I, Vol. 3 (1916), 1.
  10. Roman Egypt was a hotbed of activity and faith for the Early Christians. Indeed, Egypt’s Greeks and Copts proved rather receptive to Christian teachings, and underground communities of the Christian faithful existed in Egypt not long after Jesus’s earthly demise. Also of note, Egypt was a breeding ground for heterodox beliefs and heresies. Arianism, or the refutation of the Holy Trinity in favor of the doctrine of Jesus as the distinct creation of God, was created by a North African theologian and was particularly popular in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Alexandria was also the stronghold of Gnosticism, and all the central Gnostic texts, from the Gospel of Peter to the Acts of John, have been discovered at archaeological sites in Egypt. For more information, see C. Wilfred Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity from its Origins to 451 CE (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, 2000), 5-8.
  11. Esther Addley, “Cornish tin was sold all over Europe 3,000 years ago, say archaeologists,” The Guardian, May 6, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/07/cornish-tin-was-sold-all-over-europe-3000-years-ago-say-archaeologists.
  12. The Greco-Egyptian Ptolemaic Kingdom frequently used Celtic mercenaries in its armies, albeit these Celts mostly came from nearby Galatia in Anatolia rather than farther afield in Britain or Gaul. However, the existence of Celtic mercenary bands in Egypt means it is possible that the practice predated Ptolemy I Soter and his progeny.
  13. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 12.
  14. Ibid.
  15. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 13.
  16. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 14.
  17. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 10.
  18. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 9.
  19. Murray, “Egypt in the Grail Romance,” 12.
  20. D.M. Murdock, Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection (Stellar House, 2008), 212.
  21. Revelation 9:11 (NIV).
  22. Otto Rahn, Lucifer’s Court: A Heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers (Berserker Books, 2000), 48.
  23. John F. Miller, Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15-54.
  24. Rahn, Lucifer’s Court, 51-52.
  25. Rahn, Lucifer’s Court, 52.
  26. Highly important to note that the Bogomil faith appeared in Bulgaria within a century of its conversion to Christianity. Like the Germanic barbarians, who mostly converted to Arian Christianity, the newly baptized Bulgars proved willing to entertain heterodox and heretical ideas. Also, while it is little known or studied in the West, the Byzantine Empire, which sponsored the conversion of the Bulgarians to the Orthodox faith, frequently erupted in religious schisms and clashes between traditional authorities and dualistic and Gnostic movements. Marcionism, a dualist theology created by an Armenian Christian in the second century A.D., inspired Paulicianism, which became a major sect in Byzantine Armenia in the seventh century. Neo-Gnostic Paulicianism may have inspired Bogomilism after Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes, himself of Armenian origin, transplanted 200,000 Paulicians to Philippopolis (today’s Plovdiv) in Bulgaria.
  27. Georgi Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation: Bogomil-Cathar Influence on Wycliffe, Langland, Tyndale, and Milton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 2.
  28. Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, 3.
  29. Rahn’s degree was in philology with an emphasis on French literature.
  30. Rahn, Lucifer’s Court, 55.
  31. Ibid.
  32. Crusade Against the Grail was written and published before Rahn joined the SS.
  33. Both Crusade Against the Grail and Lucifer’s Court reason that Munsalväsch/Montsalvat, the Grail Castle in Von Eschenbach’s Parzival, is a fictional rendering of Montségur.
  34. Otto Rahn, Crusade Against the Grail: The Struggle Between the Cathars, the Templars, and the Church of Rome, Trans. Christopher Jones (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions/Bear, 2006), 30.
  35. Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest of the Spirit, and Trans. H.T. Hanson (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1996), 42.
  36. Ibid.
  37. Ibid.
  38. Evola’s cosmology would therefore position the Universal Ruler as the Christian Antichrist. Emperor Frederick II, one of the sleeping immortal emperors, was excommunicated and declared preambulus Antichristi (precursor to the Antichrist) by Pope Innocent IV.
  39. Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, 148.
  40. Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, 174.
  41. Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, 175.
  42. Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, 7.

— Justin Geoffrey is a Canadian American Christian alchemist and NEET who is the author of two books — 2022’s FULL MOON REACTION (new edition forthcoming from 1325 Press) and 2024’s THE STONE PORTAL.