The search for the Holy Grail is understood to be a quest filled with both physical and spiritual dangers. Different than the expected Grail stories of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wolfram in Parzival intertwined astrology, alchemy, the Cabala, spiritual ideas of the East, and symbolism from the Tarot, and in Chrétien’s unfinished Le Conte del Graal (c.1190), there is no obvious religious connotation at all, but a feel which is distinctly pagan. In it, there is no mention of the Grail being a cup, nor is any connection with the Last Supper or Jesus ever explicitly described, even though it is the first of the Grail romances.

In the stories, the Holy Grail is a symbol of the hero’s Spiritual journey toward - and beyond - personal transformation, like the Gnostic texts, emphasizing the responsibility of the individual for the state of his own soul. The experience of the Grail is presented as being kept for the highest initiate only, and whatever the object deemed to be was kept by women.

-- Picknett, Lynn and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998. Pages 116-120.