For Richard Wagner and Steven Spielberg, the Holy Grail is a cup; for those at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., it was a book written by Jesus; for early European Christians, it was a reliquary containing the forearms of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; for the contemporary French, it is a gypsy cult. Now, for the first time, Norma Lorre Goodrich traces the history and legend of the Holy Grail, snipping away all the fictions and myths that have accrued around this. Evocative treasure to bring us the true, historical facts of one of the most venerated of Christian objects. From the goddess and priestess era of the proto-Christians through the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, the era of King Arthur and Merlin, and the massacres of the Crusades and the Inquisition, to present-day worship in the Languedoc region of France, The Holy Grail weaves a magnificent tale of the history of religions and nations. The Holy Grail defined a. World where miracles occurred; a world that shunned crass materialism and drew an ordinary person up from his painful everyday life. Knowledge of the Grail was a quest everyone could, in imitation of his royal lords, kings, and great queens, undertake quietly, silently, and humbly. Bringing together worshipers of the disciple John with followers of the Talmud, the Grail quest reconciled the majesty of deity with the misery of humanity establishing an aristocracy of the. Spirit and providing worshipers with a nobler vision than that of war, poverty and daily existence. Worship of the Grail stressed sacrifice, courtesy, duty, care of the poor, and idealization of women (or chivalry). This code of chivalry worked a fusion between religious teachings and idealism, and the Holy Grail gave generations an ideal of purity and holiness to strive toward and, if necessary, die for. But what exactly was the Grail? The ship and altar of Perceval? Jesus' cup from the Last Supper? A stone with the power to bestow eternal youth? To answer this centuries-old question, Norma Goodrich embarked on an ambitious adventure, following the Grail from the conquest of Spain by Semitic peoples of Africa, to St. Peter in Rome, to the Grail Castle of King Arthur, and to Spain (then Aragon) for safekeeping during persecutions of Christians by Valerian. Grail worship was driven underground by the Inquisition, changing political. Fortunes, religious persecutions, fierce nationalism, the massacres of the Crusades, and the purges of heretics in France. Yet despite harrowing odds against it, the Holy Grail surfaces again and again, from Dante's Inferno to Wagner's Parsifal to the honors of Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. In The Holy Grail, Norma Goodrich cuts through centuries of conflicting stories, separating fact from fiction and, for the first time, revealing the true and definitive history. Of the Holy Grail.