The Way to the Grail Continued...

...Now for the second way – the way of the heights.

A hundred years or more after the death of Christ a man was born who in a cave widowed his soul and met the Being known as Apollo, Osiris and Ormuz; the Being who had come to earth through the stars and had died at Golgotha and had risen again - the Being of Christ.

The Christ was He, Who entered in gradalis into a stone of flesh and bone called Jesus of Nazareth, the first Grail most Holy. And in that cave Christ revealed to young man the dove that hovers from above and overshines the Grail of his soul. The youth was told to prepare the path for the Grail, so that all men might, to the Grail, their own path find. But Christ told him that before all else, there must a marriage be, of old and new within men’s hearts - this was to be his solemn task.

So when the Sun stood in the sign of the Lamb, and King Shapur reigned in the land, this young man taught concerning the primeval light descended into the darkness to overcome evil not through conflict but through love. The words of Christ to men he spoke, and so full of the spirit was his speech that men called him the comforter, the Paraclete - the messenger of the Holy Spirit promised by heaven. His name was Mani – he who is overshone by Manas...Ayeee!

But Mani had many enemies, who poisoned the mind of the king of Shapur. The priests of Zoroaster did not wish to unite the wisdom of Christ with the knowledge of Ormuz. And so it was, in the second year of the Roman emperor Gallus, in that city of Gondhi Shapur, that the priests schemed and plotted and lied...

...and had Mani crucified.

His teachings however were not lost but preserved from mouth to ear. In the meantime, ignorance reigned, for the mystery of Christ was no more understood and the church fathers not pierced by the Word’s holy lance, would hammer from it a second sense. In Councils wise men met and fought like ravenous wolves, full of hunger for their opinions. Discord bred hatred and hatred bred intolerance and from it a dark child of violence spread over their dominions. East and West divided and between them a chasm of confusion, so deep as to touch the fires of Hades! This spread to the minds of simple men and filled them with delusion. They struck down priests and philosophers, seized them in their churches, in their homes or in the streets; tore them apart limb from life or caused them such terrible strife they had to flee.

And so too the followers of Mani.

But with them went the knowledge of the Grail, through the fiery lands of the Capadoccians and to the country of the Slavs where it fell into hands of the Bogomils – the beloved of God. They in turn travelled to land of the Franks, and like the Egyptian book of Thoth and the Emerald Tablet – this knowledge was sealed in a golden box: A box within a silver box, within an ebony box - the hearts of those brave men.

And that is how the two wisdoms, one from the west and one from the east, found their way to the fair southern land of Troubadours and Cathars, the land of courtly a-mor.

And as it is true that God was a maiden’s child, then blessed be the mother whose child doth the summons hear:

This song.

For what does it tell? Of a romance, an adventure, a dream? Heaven or hell? Or is it the tale of a wisdom and knowledge won? To know it we must look for logic where there is none - like fire in water and dew in the midday sun....