"Ganthet.... The Guardians were NOT Perfect....
As They had forgotten what Living was truly like.
Logic and Order are more than admirable goals...
But such strict adherence may be too rigid for The Living."
Kyle Rayner,
Ion, The Torchbearer,
A Green Lantern
BILL MOYERS :
Was there some of this in the legend of The Holy Grail?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL :
Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about
The Origin of The Grail.
He says The Grail was brought from Heaven by
The Neutral Angels.
There was The War in Heaven
between God and Lucifer,
And The Angelic Hosts that sided one group with Lucifer,
and the other with God.
Pair of opposites :
Good and Evil
God and Satan.
The Grail was brought down through The Middle
The Way of The Middle,
By The Neutral Angels.
BILL MOYERS:
What is the Grail representing, then?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, the Grail becomes the, what we call it, that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives.
So the story very briefly is of this — I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it — but this is just one version.
The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not EARNED that position.
And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.
And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!”
And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods, a knight.
And they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other
and the lance of the grail king kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature.
And the European mind, the European life, has been as it were, emasculated by this; true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed.
And then what did the pagan represent?
He was a person from the suburbs of Eden.
He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word,
“Grail.”
That is to say,
Nature INTENDS the grail.
Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it.
And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to Life, not
obeying rules that come from a supernatural authority,
that’s the sense of The Grail.
