Re: Dutchman & government conspiracy Request
at this link
http://www.philipcoppens.com/sog_art5.html there is info about wolfram von eschenbach and the gail as a stone.
Still, one man, in the decades following Chrétien de Troyes’ account, took it upon himself to answer what the Grail was. Wolfram von Eschenbach is now known as the author of Parzival, the work that inspired Richard Wagner’s famous opera Parsifal, which in literary circles is often described as “the first extant work in German to have as its subject the Holy Grail”, as well as taking up a unique niche within the Grail literature, as it doesn’t fit in any of the categories the scholars have created. The reason for its unique position is that Wolfram, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not elaborate on Chrétien’s story, but expressed disdain for it, labelling it erroneous in many of its details, and stated that he would rectify these errors in Parzival. In short, Wolfram claimed the Grail was real, and he knew more about it. He claimed he knew because he had been in contact with a source, “Kyot”, from Provence, who was able to furnish him with “the truth”. Wolfram claimed that he was able to identify the real characters of the Grail story, as well as identify the true nature of the Grail: a magical stone.
We can compare Wolfram’s situation very much with the modern example of The Da Vinci Code. Upon the publication, and especially the success, of Dan Brown’s book, dozens of other novels appeared that treaded the same themes, some with more success than others. Brown’s book also saw a series of “guides”, that enhanced upon the organisations, places and people worked into the book, and debated their historical veracity, or not. Amazingly, this would lead to official statements from the Vatican, as well as a high-profile court case in which two non-fiction authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, sued Brown’s publisher for copyright infringement.
A series of non-fictional works, specifically on the Grail and Mary Magdalene, also saw re-editions, often with new titles that included the keyword “code” in it, and some which even used the same font and cover design that had made The Da Vinci Code stand out in the bookstalls.
Imagine the task of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who amidst this frenzy is trying to argue that Chrétien got it wrong, but that he knows the truth. It is, of course, not an easy task and it does bear some resemblance to some claims made by authors today that they “knew” the truth about Dan Brown’s novel – one of whom then adopted the pen-name of Dan Green!
In retrospect, Wolfram failed miserably; he was unable to persuade Western Europe that he had definitively answered what the Grail was. Today, most scholars even doubt the veracity of his source Kyot, believing instead that Kyot was a literary device invented by Wolfram to explain his deviations from Chrétien’s storyline. Professor of history Joseph Goering, when discussing Wolfram, thus calls his work “the most elaborate and inventive retelling of Chrétien’s story”, to add later that the book illustrates “the fecundity of imagination” of Wolfram.
Nobody, it seems, believed Wolfram when he was claiming to speak the truth. Instead, he was held to be “just” another writer. Only centuries later, would he be saved from this doom, by being labelled “an oddity”, if only because he did not embrace the Christian setting that had become the standard frame of reference into which one spoke about the Grail – the Holy Grail.
Today, the Grail is largely seen as a literary invention, but this may be a serious mistake. For one, Wolfram on Eschenbach never wrote fiction; he was known for writing family histories – non-fiction. Noting that he stated that when addressing the Grail, he was correcting errors and was writing a factual account, there is an obvious blatant problem that is never addressed by any of the scholars: by all accounts, Wolfram was a non-fiction writer, who set out to write a non-fiction account about the Grail.
Furthermore, Wolfram is very specific, not only identifying his source as Kyot, but stating that Kyot based the origin of the Grail on two documents. Despite such information, the experts state they have been unable to identify who Kyot was (which is, of course, their problem, not Wolfram’s), and hence they have treated Kyot as a literary invention by Wolfram, or is mentioned, without any further explanation.
In short, Wolfram’s Grail story was his rendition of Kyot’s historical detective work. One of the documents on which the Grail story is based is a family history, which was the history of Perceval, the leader of the family who came to possess the Grail. The other document is a pagan document, thought to be absent from Christian medieval Europe, containing a pagan doctrine that required an initiation… hence, a brotherhood.
Hence, what the “Grail quest” set forth in this book has uncovered, is threefold. First, there is no reason to doubt that the Grail was indeed a magical stone. Second, that this stone was in the possession of the Aragon royal family that lived on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees – the general region where Rahn and Himmler explored. That this family had created a series of initiations and rites, linked with the worship of this object, and which we will refer to as the “Grail Brotherhood”. That the real Perceval, of French descent, was welcomed into this Brotherhood because of his family ties to the Aragon royal family. Third, that the Aragon royal family initiated a project, in which they hoped to transform Europe into a “Grail Kingdom”: unite it, and transform into a theocracy, in which the unifying power – object – would be the Grail itself. That their ambition failed (quite early on too), might have contributed to the problems Wolfram faced in convincing the people of Western Europe that he was nevertheless right. But right, it seems by all accounts, he was… and the Grail was – is – real.
Excerpted from the introduction of “Servants of the Grail”
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