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→The Holy Grail: added history of the grail clipped from the King Arthur page
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=== The Holy Grail ===
The Holy Grail: The cup which Jesus Christ supposedly drank from at the Last Supper and/or the cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to capture the blood of Christ at the crucifixion. First popularized by [[King Arthur|Arthurian Legend]], and used absolutely everywhere since, from ''[[Monty Python]]'' [[Monty
The history of the Grail is rather complicated. Ostensibly the cup that Jesus drank from during the Last Supper, brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea, it's a [[Celtic Mythology|Celtic invention]] that was unknown on the continent before the Arthurian mythos brought it there. It first surfaced in the late 1100s, in an incomplete poem by [[Chrétien de Troyes]] (whose contributions to Arthurian canon were action-packed and unconcerned with spiritual matters), in which a naive Welsh knight named Perceval meets the [[Fisher King]]. A grail appears as part of a larger and quite bizarre mystical procession and is referred simply as "a grail" with no holy context, apart from carrying a host wafer. Perceval fails in his quest by not asking the Fisher King what the hell's going on (making this story the first ever [[Sierra]] adventure game).
Over subsequent centuries, the Holy Grail grew into the entire ''raison d'etre'' of the entire Arthurian Court, when originally the Grail Quest was so singularly dangerous that there was a special chair at the Round Table reserved for those who dared attempt it, called the Siege Perilous. By giving the knights a single sacred focus rather than having them [[Walking the Earth|stumbling around Britain]] falling ass backwards into [[The Quest|quests]], this transformation made the sprawling tangle of stories more coherent, and elevated the moral standing of the knights.
The Holy Grail itself also grew hugely in significance, in some cases taking on parts of various other magic hamper and cauldron myths, which created a [[Continuity Snarl|mythological snarl]] whose origins modern scholars are nowhere close to deciphering (compare to the several lucid theories about the Sword in the Stone that have cropped up in modern scholarship). By the first decade of 13th century, in ''Parzival'' by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal's calling to the Grail Quest is explicitly a calling to a higher and better world than the normal quests of Arthur's court. The text claims that the Grail itself was the stone the neutral angels of Heaven stayed in during the war against Lucifer. By the 15th century, Malory depicts the Grail [[Cosmic Keystone|as so powerful]] that when Galahad (the most pure and dedicated of all the knights) succeeds on the Grail quest he [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence|instantly ascends to Heaven]].
==== [[Anime and Manga]] ====
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