The Holy Grail as Sexual Quest

Strip away the clothes and what you find at the heart of the Holy Grail myths is sex and sexual passion.  The virgin knight errant must first climb the holy mountain, cross the perilous bridge to the castle and there explore the chamber of mysteries to claim the rose and the grail inside.  God help you if you cannot find the masculine sexual quest motif in that.

Even before Monty Python took it on, the sexual dimension was present in the sub-plots: Lancelot’s dalliance with Guinevere, the sexually impotent Wounded King, the incest that produced Mordred…  For that reason the Victorians avoided the Grail legends until Tennyson cleaned them up (Idylls of the King).  After that, the pre-Raphaelites tried to play loose with them, but their paintings are surprisingly chaste, with not a naked breast among them.  The painting above is Arthur Hacker’s The Temptation of Sir Percival (1894), where the hero appears to be in doubt about the mission.

The far more famous painting below shows what happened to Merlin, who won’t be finding no Holy Grail: The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones (1870’s).  Most critics read it autobiographically: Burne-Jones beguiled by his model and mistress, Maria Zambaco.  At one point when he wanted to break off the affair (he was married), she suggested a suicide pact in Regents Canal.  He was horrified, so she threatened to jump in anyway.  Neighbors and police rushed to the rescue.  The lovers later attempted to run away to France together but that didn’t work out either.  Like in the Grail legends…

Related Holy Grail links:

Hildegard of Bingen and medieval sexual imagery
Casanova and The Elixir of Life
Wagner's erotic Parzifal
Beauty & the Beast and the red rose
The DaVinci Code and Mary Magdalene
The Secret (scroll to the end)