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The search for the Holy Grail has never ceased. This legendary, sacred
vessel, from which Christ is thought to have drunk at the Last Supper,
is the most important relic in Christendom, and has not been found. Or
has it?
It is a story that has fascinated generations of Englishmen, from Malory
to Monty Python. Many scholars believe that the bowl passed into the possession
of Joseph of Arimathea, after he used it to gather the blood of Christ
following the Crucifixion. Later, Joseph reputedly brought the olive-wood
cup from the Holy Land to Glastonbury, in Somerset, where he founded an
abbey in the first century.
And yet the final resting place of the Holy Grail remains shrouded
in mystery. The Knights Templar were rumored to have acquired it or the secret
behind it while recent books and movies purport that the Grail was Mary
Magdalene who gave birth to a child or children fathered by Jesus and created a
bloodline still in existence today. Others
believe it was taken to Nova Scotia in 1398. Many others, including a generation
of hippies, think Joseph hid it either in the Chalice Well in Glastonbury
or beneath the Tor.
And then there are those who are convinced it is lodged in a much less
romantic resting place - the vault of a branch of Lloyds TSB bank somewhere
in Herefordshire, taken there for safe-keeping from its last home - a house
in west Wales.
For hundreds of years, generations - in particular, the 1960s hippies
- have believed that a cup housed at Nanteos was the Grail. The "Nanteos
Cup", as it became known, arrived there after the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
when a group of Glastonbury monks, attempting to escape the ravages of
Henry VIII's commissioners, ran first to Strata Florida Abbey, in South
Wales, and then over the hills to nearby Nanteos House, the old country
home of the Powell family.
The former Prior of Glastonbury became chaplain to the family and the
other monks became servants around the estate. Only when the last monk
was on his deathbed did he reveal that the Holy Grail had not been left
behind in Glastonbury but that his group had brought it with them. He entrusted
it to the Powell's "until the church shall claim her own".
For the next two centuries the cup stood behind glass, apparently performing
miracles and attracting pilgrims by the hundred. Richard Wagner - who wrote
the Grail opera Parsifal - made a visit to see it at the invitation of
the then heir to the house, George Powell. Powell, who was friends with
the poet Algernon Swinburne and fed roast monkey flesh to Guy de Maupassant,
believed that the cup possessed miraculous healing powers. Water poured
into it was sent around the world to those afflicted with various diseases
and ailments.
Others mocked the idea that it was the Holy Grail and thought it more
likely to be a 12th-century artifact that had been brought back from the
Crusades. But, whether real or fake, it turned into little more than a
sliver of chewed wood over the years, due to pilgrims biting large chunks
out of it. And when the last of the Powell's died in 1952, the house (and
the cup) were sold to a Major Merrilees, who later moved to Herefordshire,
taking the Nanteos Cup with him, and later depositing it in a bank vault
somewhere in the county.
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