Letty's Grave
The incident I am about to relate happened fifteen years ago. Several years earlier, when I was travelling in India, my father had died suddenly, and, as I could not be contacted for almost a week, I missed his funeral. So, when I eventually came back to live in England, one of the first things I did was to visit his grave. My sister accompanied me to show me where it was located.
After we had laid flowers on his grave, my sister remembered that this was the same graveyard in which our aunt Letty was buried. Letty had been the black sheep of the family and had been, by all accounts, "a bit of a character". She had died when my sister and I were young teenagers, but we had fond if somewhat vague memories of her from our childhood.
We decided we would find her grave and "say hello".
The graveyard was huge, and it had changed a great deal since I had last visited it, so I left it to my sister to locate Letty's grave. However, after searching through the rows of headstones for over twenty minutes, we still hadn't found Letty, and it was getting quite late. We were just about to give up when suddenly a woman's voice called out "Over here - I'm over here!". We both looked up in the direction of the voice, but we could see no-one. "It's someone playing silly beggers," my sister remarked, and walked over to the spot from where the voice had seemed to come. I followed her, feeling a little uneasy. But there was nobody to be seen. In fact the whole graveyard appeared to be deserted now. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, and when I looked at my sister I saw that she had gone white. "This is it," she said, pointing down at the gravestone at our feet. With my heart pounding in my chest, I looked at the headstone and read my aunt's name on it...
I can't begin to describe to you how petrified I was - we both were - as we practically ran out of that graveyard, clutching onto each other.
This is a true story. There is no possibility of our having imagined that voice, or what it said, as we both heard the same thing. My sister and I have talked about it many times, and tried to find a less ghostly explanation for what happened on that day, but the only conclusion we can ever come to is that Letty wanted us to find her grave.
We Ran Over A Ghost!
Around 31 years ago, just after we had got engaged, my fiancé was driving us back from my parents home in Herne Bay, in Kent, in his open-top sports car. The motorway had only just been built, and there were hardly any cars on it in those days.
We crossed over the motorway to a village, and there at dusk - it was 9pm precisely - we ran over a ghost!
I felt a bump on my passenger side, and screamed: "We've run over someone!"
My fiance? had seen a tall figure, in a long riding mac, or trench coat, wearing long boots and a tall hat. I had caught a glimpse of this figure too.
We got out and had a look around, but there was nothing under or behind the car. It was dusk, and the headlights of our car were on, so we could see the area quite clearly. Weird!
When we reached the next phone box we rang my dad, who had at one time been involved with the Spiritualist church in Surrey. He advised us to contact the Psychic Research people when we got home.
What we actually did was to look up, in a book book on ghosts, all the known ghosts in that area.
The village where we'd had our ghostly encounter turned out to be Smarsden, in Kent - and it was listed as the most haunted village in that county!
In fact we found two ghosts described in the book that fitted the description of the ghost we'd "bumped into". As the road had been altered recently to make way for the turn-off road for the motorway, it could have dislodged a ghost, or apparition, of either "The Highwayman", or "The Schoolmaster"! Both descriptions fitted the figure we had seen.
I might add, now 30 years later, that I've since developed the gifts of channelling, or spiritual mediumship - but my husband is still a sceptic.
Easter is a time of springtime festivals. In Christian countries Easter is celebrated as the religious holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the son of God. But the celebrations of Easter have many customs and legends that are pagan in origin and have nothing to do with Christianity
The name Easter is thought to come from the Scandinavian "Ostra" and the Teutonic "Ostern" or "Eastre," both Goddesses of mythology signifying spring and fertility. Their festival was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox.
Traditions associated with the festival survive in the Easter rabbit, a symbol of fertility, and in colored Easter eggs, originally painted with bright colors to represent the sunlight of spring, and used in Easter-egg rolling contests or given as gifts
The Christian celebration of Easter embodies a number of traditions with emphasis on the relation of Easter to the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach). Pasch, another name used by Europeans for Easter, is derived from Pesach.
Easter customs may vary throughout the world with each country having its own distinctive traditions.
Eggs and bunnies enter into many of the Easter celebrations believed to have originated with the pagan traditions of new life and growing things.
A Spanish festival commemorates the resurrection with colorful fireworks and booming cannons. Judas images often are shot at by the soldiers.
Many Greeks bought Easter candles and colored eggs for Good Friday. Then on Easter, the traditional lamb was served for dinner. Sometimes solemn processions wound through the streets with the paraders carrying lighted candles and holy pictures.
A Bavarian custom was the fashioning of little crosses to set up in the fields. Easter parades also were traditional, and the children often rolled Easter eggs downhill for fun.
For a long time, the custom in Tyrol called for musicians to tour every valley, singing the Easter hymns as they went . The villagers joined in when the singers passed, and after dark and lighted the way with torches.
Easter in The U.S. of A. is a combination of the celebrations from various countries, the customs brought by settlers who came here from the many different countries.
Some Easter Symbols and Legends and What They Mean
Easter Bells
Are rung in France and Italy throughout the year but they are not rung on the Thursday before Good Friday. They are silent as a way to remember the death of Jesus. They are then rung on Easter Sunday as a way of telling people Jesus is alive again.
The Cross
This is the symbol for the Christain religion as Jesus was put on a cross but then came back to life.
The Easter Lily
The lily was a reminder to the Christians of how Jesus came back to life.
Easter Flowers
Such as daffodil, narcissus and the tulip. Area symbol as they bloom in the spring.
Pussy Willows
These are easpecially picked at Easter in England and Russia. People would tap each other on the shoulders with a branch of the pussy willow for good luck.
Lambs
The lamb is a symbol as people thought of Jesus as the Good Shepherd who would watch over them as they were lambs.
Rabbits
Rabbits are reminder of spring and new life. They were the favorite animal of the spring goddess Eastre.
The Egg
These are a symbol of spring as well as Easter. They are a sign of new life.
Chicks
The chicks are born from eggs and are a reminder of spring and Easter.
Legend of the Dogwood
An old and beautiful legend says that, at the time of the crucifixion, the dogwood was comparable in size to the oak tree and other monarchs of the forest. Because of its firmness and strength it was selected as the timber for the cross, but to be put to such a cruel use greatly distressed the tree. Sensing this, the crucified Jesus in his gentle pity for the sorrow and suffering of all said to it: "Because of your sorrow and pity for My sufferings, never again will the dogwood tree grow large enough to be used as a cross. Henceforth it will be slender, bent and twisted and its blossoms will be in the form of a cross ~ two long and two short petals. In the center of the outer edge of each petal there will be nail prints ~ brown with rust and stained with red ~ and in the center of the flower will be a crown of thorns, and all who see this will remember."
The Easter Lily
One of the most famous biblical references to the lily is the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ told his listeners: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
Often called the "white-robed apostles of hope," lilies are said to have been found growing in the garden of Gethsemane after Christ's agony. Tradition says that the beautiful white lilies sprang up where drops of Christ's sweat fell to the ground in his final hours of sorrow and distress. Christian churches continue this tradition at Easter by filling their altars and surrounding their crosses with masses of Easter lilies to commemorate the Resurrection and hope of life everlasting.
The pure white lily has long been closely associated with the Virgin Mary. In early paintings, the Angel Gabriel is pictured extending to Mary a branch of pure white lilies, announcing that she is to be the Mother of the Christ child. In other paintings, saints are pictured bringing vases full of white lilies to Mary and the Infant Jesus.
In yet another expression of womanhood, lilies had a significant presence in the paradise of Adam and Eve. Tradition has it that when Eve left the Garden of Eden she shed real tears of repentance, and from those remorseful tears sprang up lilies.
The Legend of the Butterfly
The life-cycle of the butterfly is used to symbolize the three stages in the life of Christ and the Christian. The caterpillar's incessant crawling and chewing reminds us of normal earthly life where people are often preoccupied with taking care of their physical needs. The chrysalis or cocoon resembles the tomb and suggests the empty grave clothes of the risen Christ. The butterfly represents the resurrection into a new and glorious life, free of material concerns and restrictions.
Early Gnostics portrayed the Angel of Death as a winged foot stepping on a butterfly. This insect is also found in paintings of Mary and the Christ Child.
Almost in opposition to its resurrection symbolism, the butterfly is also a symbol of frail humanity and the vanity and brevity of life. This delicate insect might even be torn apart by a hard rain. The dainty butterfly represents women, fickleness, autumn, joy, beauty, life, immortality, and new beginnings.
The Easter Bunny
The Easter Bunny is a symbol that originated with the pagan festival of Eastre. The goddess, Eastre, was worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons through her earthly symbol, the hare or rabbit.
The date of Easter is determined by the moon whose symbolism is strongly tied to that of the hare. In fact, the hare is the symbol for the moon. Ever since the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., Easter has been celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after March 21st.
The Easter bunny was introduced to American folklore by the German settlers who arrived in the Pennsylvania Dutch country during the 1700s. The arrival of the "Oschter Haws" was considered "childhood's greatest pleasure" next to a visit from Christ-Kindel on Christmas Eve. The children believed that if they were good the "Oschter Haws" would lay a nest of colored eggs.
The children would build their nest in a secluded place in the home, the barn or the garden. Boys would use their caps and girls their bonnets to make the nests . The use of elaborate Easter baskets came later as the tradition of the Easter bunny spread through out the country.
Necromancy
Necromancy (IPA: /ˈnekɹəˌmænsɪ/) (Greek νεκρομαντία, nekromantía) is a form of divination in which the practitioner seeks to summon "operative spirits" or "spirits of divination", for multiple reasons, from spiritual protection to wisdom. The word necromancy derives from the Greek νεκρός (nekrós), "dead", and μαντεία (manteía), "divination".
However, since the Renaissance, necromancy has come to be associated more broadly with black magic and demon-summoning in general, sometimes losing its earlier, more specialized meaning. By popular etymology, nekromantia became nigromancy "black arts", and Johannes Hartlieb (1456) lists demonology in general under the heading. Eliphas Levi, in his book Dogma et Ritual, states that necromancy is the evoking of aerial bodies (aeromancy).
Early necromancy is likely related to shamanism, which calls upon spirits such as the ghosts of ancestors. Classical necromancers addressed the dead in "a mixture of high-pitch squeaking and low droning", comparable to the trance-state mutterings of shamans.
The historian Strabo refers to necromancy as the principal form of divination amongst the people of Persia (Strabo, xvi. 2, 39, νεκρομαντία), and it is believed to also have been widespread amongst the peoples of Chaldea (particularly amongst the Sabians or star-worshipers), Etruria, and Babylonia. The Babylonian necromancers were called Manzazuu or Sha'etemmu, and the spirits they raised were called Etemmu.
Necromancy was widespread in Western antiquity with records of practice in Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The oldest literary account of necromancy is in Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 700 BCE). In the Odyssey (XI, Nekyia), Odysseus under the tutelage of Circe, a powerful sorceress, makes a voyage to Hades, the Underworld, in an effort to raise the spirits of the dead using spells which Circe has instructed. His intention is to invoke and ask questions of the shade of Tiresias, in order to gain insight on the impending voyage home. Alas, he is unable to summon the spirit without the assistance of others. In Homer's passage, there are many references to specific rituals associated with necromancy; the rites must be done during nocturnal hours, and based around a pit with fire.In addition, Odysseus has to follow a specific recipe, which included using sacrificial animals' blood for ghosts to drink, while he recites prayers to both the ghosts and gods of the underworld.Rituals, such as these, were common practices associated with necromancy, and varied from the mundane to the more grotesque. Rituals in necromancy involved magic circles, wands, talismans, bells, and incantations. Also, the necromancer would surround himself with morbid aspects of death, which often included wearing the deceased's clothing, consumption of unsalted, unleavened black bread and unfermented grape juice, which symbolized decay and lifelessness. Necromancers even went as far as taking part in the mutilation and consumption of corpses. Rituals, such as these, could carry on for hours, days, even weeks leading up the summoning of spirits. Often these practices took part in graveyards or in other melancholy venues that suited specific guidelines of the necromancer. Additionally, necromancers preferred summoning the recently departed, citing that their revelations were spoken more clearly; this time frame usually consisted of 12 months following the death of the body. Once this time period lapsed, necromancers would summon the deceased’s ghostly spirit to appear instead.
Although some cultures may have considered the knowledge of the dead to be unlimited, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, there is an indication that individual shades knew only certain things. The apparent value of their counsel may have been a result of things they had known in life, or of knowledge they acquired after death: Ovid writes of a marketplace in the underworld, where the dead could exchange news and gossip.
There are also many references to necromancers, called "bone-conjurers", in the Bible. The Book of Deuteronomy (XVIII 9–12) explicitly warns the Israelites against the Canaanite practice of divination from the dead. This warning was not always heeded: King Saul has the Witch of Endor invoke the shade of Samuel using a magical amulet, for example. Later Christian writers rejected the idea that humans could bring back the spirits of the dead, and interpreted such shades as disguised demons, thus conflating necromancy with demon-summoning.
Caesarius of Arles entreats his audience to put no stock in any demons, or "gods" other than the Christian God, even if the working of spells appears to provide benefit. He states that demons only act with divine permission and are permitted by God to test Christian people. Caesarius does not condemn man here; he only states that the art of necromancy exists, although it is prohibited by the Bible.
Many medieval writers believed resurrection was impossible without the assistance of the Christian God. They translated the practice of divination as conjuring demons who took the appearance of spirits. The practice became known explicitly as demonic magic and was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. Though the practitioners of necromancy were linked by many common threads, there is no evidence that these necromancers were ever organized as a group.
Medieval necromancy is believed to be a synthesis of astral magic derived from Arabic influences and exorcism derived from Christian and Jewish teachings. Arabic influences are evident in rituals that involve moon phases, sun placement, day and time. Fumigation and the act of burying images are also found in both astral magic and necromancy. Christian and Jewish influences are found in the symbols and conjuration formulas used in summoning rituals.
Practitioners were often members of the Christian clergy, though some nonclerical practitioners are recorded. In some instances, mere apprentices or those ordained to lower orders dabbled in the practice. They were connected by a belief in the manipulation of spiritual beings, (esp. demons), and magical practices. These practitioners were almost always literate and well educated. Most possessed basic knowledge of exorcism and had access to texts of astrology and demonology. Clerical training was informal and admission to universities was rare. Most were trained under apprenticeships and were expected to have a basic knowledge of Latin, ritual and doctrine. This education was not always linked to spiritual guidance and seminaries were almost nonexistent. This absence allowed some aspiring clerics to combine Christian rites with occult practices despite its condemnation in Christian doctrine.
Medieval practitioners believed they could accomplish three things with necromancy: will manipulation, illusions, and knowledge. Will manipulation affects the mind and will of another person, animal, or spirit. Demons are summoned to cause various afflictions on others “to drive them mad, to inflame them to love or hatred, to gain their favor, or to constrain them to do or not do some deed.” Illusions involve reanimation of the dead, food and entertainment, or conjuring a mode of transportation. Knowledge is discovered through demons. Demons provide information on various things including identifying a criminal, finding items, or revealing future events.
The act of performing medieval necromancy usually involved magic circles, conjurations, and sacrifices as shown in the Munich Handbook. Circles were usually traced on the ground, though cloth and parchment were sometimes implemented. Various objects, shapes, symbols, and letters may be drawn or placed within that represent a mixture of Christian and occult ideas. Circles were believed to empower and protect what was contained within, including protecting the necromancer from the conjured demons. Conjuration is the method of communicating with the demons to enter the physical world. It usually employs the power of special words and stances to call out the demons and often incorporated the use of Christian prayers or biblical verses. These conjurations may be repeated in succession or repeated to different directions until the summoning is complete. Sacrifice was the payment for summoning. Though it may involve the flesh of a human being or animal, it could sometimes be as simple as offering a certain object. Instructions for obtaining these items were usually specific. The time, location, and method of gathering items for sacrifice could also play an important role in the ritual.
The rare confessions of those accused of Necromancy suggest that there was a range of spell casting and the related magical experimentation. It is difficult to determine if these details were due to their practices, as opposed to the whims of their interrogators. John of Salisbury is one of the first examples related by Kieckhefer, but as a Parisian ecclesiastical court record of 1323 shows, a “group who were plotting to invoke the demon Berich from inside a circle made from strips of cat skin,” were obviously participating in the church’s definition of “necromancy.”
Norse mythology also contains examples of necromancy (Ruickbie, 2004:48), such as the scene in the Völuspá in which Odin summons a seeress from the dead to tell him of the future. In Grógaldr, the first part of Svipdagsmál, the hero Svipdag summons his dead Völva mother, Gróa, to cast spells for him. In Hrólf Kraki's saga, the half-elven princess Skuld was very skilled in witchcraft (seiðr), and this to the point that she was almost invincible in battle. When her warriors fell, she made them rise again to continue fighting.
Herbert Stanley Redgrove claims that necromancy was one of three chief branches of medieval ceremonial magic, the others being black magic and white magic. This does not correspond to contemporary classifications, which use nigromancy and black arts synonymously.
In the wake of inconsistencies of judgment, necromancers, sorcerers and witches were able to utilize spells with holy names with impunity, as biblical references in such rituals could be construed as prayers as opposed to spells. As a result, the necromancy discussed in the Munich Manual is an evolution of these understandings. It has even been suggested that the authors of the Munich Manual knowingly designed this book to be in discord with understood ecclesiastical law.
The main recipe employed throughout the manual in the necromancy sorcery uses the same vocabulary and structure utilizing the same languages, sections, names of power alongside demonic names. The understanding of the names of God from apocryphal texts and the Hebrew torah demand that the author of such rites have at least a casual familiarity of these texts.
Within the tales related in occult manuals, we also find connections with other stories in similar cultural literature (Kieckhefer, 43). The ceremony for conjuring a horse closely relates to the Arabic The Thousand and One Nights, and the French romances. Chaucer’s The Squire's Tale also has marked similarities. This becomes a parallel evolution of spells to foreign gods or demons that were once acceptable, and framing them into a new Christian context, albeit demonic and forbidden. Most forms of Satanic Necromancy today include prayers to such demons, namely Nebiros, and Eurynomos.
As the source material for these manuals is apparently derived from scholarly magical and religious texts from a variety of sources in many languages, it is easy to conclude that the scholars that studied these texts manufactured their own aggregate sourcebook and manual with which to work spells or magic.
In the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, it is stated that:
Of all human opinions that is to be reputed the most foolish which deals with the belief in Necromancy, the sister of Alchemy, which gives birth to simple and natural things. (taken from 12:13)
In modern time necromancy is used as a more general term to describe the art (or manipulation) of death, and generally implies a magical connotation. Modern séances, channeling, Spiritism and Spiritualism verge on necromancy when the invoked spirits are asked to reveal future events. Necromancy may also be presented as sciomancy, a branch of theurgic magic.
Necromancy is extensively practiced in Quimbanda and is sometimes seen in other African traditions such as voodoo and in santeria. In these religions, spirits (called Egungun or Orishas) can be sent out to attack a person or they can be asked to take possession of someone. Once a person is possessed by a spirit in the yoruba tradition he cannot rise to a higher spiritual position such as that of a babalawo tough, but this should not be regarded as a modern tradition, in fact it predates most necromantic practices.[citation needed]
An Encyclopedia of Occultism states:
The art is of almost universal usage. Considerable difference of opinion exists among modern adepts as to the exact methods to be properly pursued in the necromantic art, and it must be borne in mind the necromancy, which in the Middle Ages was called sorcery, shades into modern spiritualistic practice. There is no doubt, however, that necromancy is the touchstone of occultism, for if, after careful preparation the adept can carry through to a successful issue, the raising of the soul from the other world, he has proved the value of his art.
The Necronomicon is a fictional book appearing in the stories by horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound",written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft's "The Nameless City". Among other things, the work contains an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning them.
Other authors such as August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith also cited it in their works; Lovecraft approved, believing such common allusions built up "a background of evil verisimilitude." Many readers have believed it to be a real work, with booksellers and librarians receiving many requests for it; pranksters have listed it in rare book catalogues, and a student smuggled a card for it into the Yale University Library's card catalog.
Capitalizing on the notoriety of the fictional volume, real-life publishers have printed many books entitled Necronomicon since Lovecraft's death.
How Lovecraft conceived the name "Necronomicon" is not clear — Lovecraft said that the title came to him in a dream. Although some have suggested that Lovecraft was influenced primarily by Robert W. Chambers' collection of short stories The King in Yellow, which centers on a mysterious and disturbing play in book form, Lovecraft is not believed to have read that work until 1927
Donald R. Burleson has argued that the idea for the book was derived from Nathaniel Hawthorne, though Lovecraft himself noted that "mouldy hidden manuscripts" were one of the stock features of Gothic literature
Lovecraft wrote that the title, as translated from the Greek language, meant "an image of the law of the dead": nekros - νεκρός ("dead"), nomos - νόμος ("law"), eikon - εικών ("image"). A more prosaic translation can be derived by conjugating nemo ("to consider"): "Concerning the dead".
Lovecraft was often asked about the veracity of the Necronomicon, and always answered that it was completely his invention.
Reinforcing the book's fictionalization, the name of the book's supposed author, Abdul Alhazred, is not even a grammatically correct Arabic name. The name "Abdul" simply means "the worshiper/slave of...". Standing alone, it would make no sense, as Alhazred is not a last name in the Western sense, but a reference to a person's place of birth.
In 1927, Lovecraft wrote a brief pseudo-history of the Necronomicon that was published in 1938, after his death, as A History of The Necronomicon.[10] This work allowed subsequent fiction writers to remain consistent with Lovecraft's treatment of the Necronomicon.[11] According to this account, the book was originally called Al Azif, an Arabic word that Lovecraft defined as "that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons". (One Arabic/English dictionary translates `Azīf as "whistling (of the wind); weird sound or noise".) (It is noteworthy that the Goetia is sometimes translated to have a similar meaning.)
In the History, Alhazred is said to have been a "half-crazed Arab" who worshipped the Lovecraftian entities Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. He is described as being from Sanaa in Yemen, and as visiting the ruins of Babylon, the "subterranean secrets" of Memphis and the Empty Quarter of Arabia (where he discovered the "nameless city" below Irem). In his last years, he lived in Damascus, where he wrote Al Azif before his sudden and mysterious death in 738.
In subsequent years, Lovecraft wrote, the Azif "gained considerable, though surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age." In 950, it was translated into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a fictional scholar from Constantinople. This version "impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts" before being "suppressed and burnt" in 1050 by Patriarch Michael (an historical figure who died in 1059).
After this attempted suppression, the work was "only heard of furtively" until it was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wormius. (Lovecraft gives the date of this edition as 1228, though the real-life Danish scholar Olaus Wormius lived from 1588 to 1624.) Both the Latin and Greek text, the History relates, were banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, though Latin editions were apparently published in 15th century Germany and 17th century Spain. A Greek edition was printed in Italy in the first half of the 16th century.
The Elizabethan magician John Dee (1527-c. 1609) allegedly translated the book — presumably into English — but Lovecraft wrote that this version was never printed and only fragments survive. (The connection between Dee and the Necronomicon was suggested by Lovecraft's friend Frank Belknap Long).
According to Lovecraft, the Arabic version of Al Azif had already disappeared by the time the Greek version was banned in 1050, though he cites "a vague account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the current century" that "later perished in fire". The Greek version, he writes, has not been reported "since the burning of a certain Salem man's library in 1692" (an apparent reference to the Salem witch trials). (In the story The Diary of Alonzo Typer, the character Alonzo Typer finds a Greek copy.)
Appearance and contents
The Necronomicon is mentioned in a number of Lovecraft's short stories and in his novellas At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. However, despite frequent references to the book, Lovecraft was very sparing of details about its appearance and contents. He once wrote that "if anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it."
In "The Nameless City" (1921), a rhyming couplet that appears at two points in the story is ascribed to Abdul Alhazred:
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The same couplet appears in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), where it is identified as a quotation from the Necronomicon. This "much-discussed" couplet, as Lovecraft calls it in the latter story, has also been quoted in works by other authors, including Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, which adds a long paragraph preceding the couplet.
The Necronomicon is undoubtedly a substantial text, as indicated by its description in The Dunwich Horror (1929). In the story, Wilbur Whateley visits Miskatonic University's library to consult the "unabridged" version of the Necronomicon for a spell that would have appeared on the 751st page of his own inherited, but defective, Dee edition.
The Necronomicon's appearance and physical dimensions are not clearly stated in Lovecraft's work. Other than the obvious black letter editions, it is commonly portrayed as bound in leather of various types and having metal clasps. Moreover, editions are sometimes disguised. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for example, John Merrit pulls down a book labelled Qanoon-e-Islam from Joseph Curwen’s bookshelf and discovers to his disquiet that it is actually the Necronomicon.
In the Evil Dead series of movies, a similar book is described as "Bound in human flesh and inked in blood, it contains bizarre burial rituals and demon resurrection passages. It was never meant for the world of the living." Many commercially available versions of the book fail to include any of the contents that Lovecraft describes. The Simon Necronomicon in particular has been criticized for this.
According to Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon", copies of the original Necronomicon were held by only five institutions worldwide:
* The British Museum
* The Bibliothèque nationale de France
* Widener Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
* The University of Buenos Aires
* The library of the fictional Miskatonic University in the also fictitious Arkham, Massachusetts
The last institution holds the Latin translation by Olaus Wormius, printed in Spain in the 17th century.
Other copies, Lovecraft wrote, were kept by private individuals. Joseph Curwen, as noted, had a copy in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941). A version is held in Kingsport in "The Festival" (1925). The provenance of the copy read by the narrator of "The Nameless City" is unknown; a version is read by the protagonist in "The Hound" (1924).
Although Lovecraft insisted that the book was pure invention (and other writers invented passages from the book in their own works), there are accounts of some people actually believing the Necronomicon to be a real book. Lovecraft himself sometimes received letters from fans inquiring about the Necronomicon's authenticity. Pranksters occasionally listed the Necronomicon for sale in book store newsletters or inserted phony entries for the book in library card catalogues (where it may be checked out to one 'A. Alhazred', ostensibly the book's author and original owner). The Widener Library at Harvard, which is supposed to have a copy of the "Necronomicon" according to Lovecraft's stories, has a catalog entry telling the seeker to "inquire at desk". While the stories surrounding the Necronomicon claim that it is an extremely powerful and dangerous book (one that would not be safe just sitting on a shelf, where anyone could read it), it is equally possible that the listing has a much more mundane purpose -- several (equally fictional) versions of the book do exist, and (since books such as the Necronomicon are frequently stolen from the shelves) the entry may simply be an attempt to prevent its theft.
Similarly, the university library of Tromsø, Norway, lists a translated version of the Necronomicon, attributed to Petrus de Dacia and published in 1994, although the document is listed as 'unavailable'. Necronomicon.
In 1973, Owlswick Press issued an edition of the Necronomicon written in an indecipherable, apparently fictional language known as "Duriac." This was a limited edition of 348. The book contains a brief introduction by L. Sprague de Camp.
The line between fact and fiction was further blurred in the late 1970s when a book purporting to be a translation of the "real Necronomicon" was published. This book, by the pseudonymic "Simon," had little connection to the fictional Lovecraft Mythos but instead was based on Sumerian mythology. It was later dubbed the "Simon Necronomicon." Going into trade paperback in 1980 it has never been out of print and has sold 800,000 copies by 2006 making it the most popular Necronomicon to date.[citation needed] Despite its contents the book's marketing focused heavily on the Lovecraft connection and made sensational claims made for the book's magical power. The blurb states it was "potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World". Three additional volumes have since been published — The Necronomicon Spellbook, a book of pathworkings with the 50 names of Marduk, Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon, a history of the book itself and of the late 1970s New York occult scene, and The Gates Of The Necronomicon, instructions on pathworking with the Simon Necronomicon.
A hoax version of the Necronomicon, edited by George Hay, appeared in 1978 and included an introduction by the paranormal researcher and writer Colin Wilson. David Langford described how the book was prepared from a computer analysis of a discovered "cipher text" by Dr. John Dee. The resulting "translation" was in fact written by occultist Robert Turner, but it was far truer to the Lovecraftian version than the Simon text and even incorporated quotations from Lovecraft's stories in its passages. Wilson also wrote a story, "The Return of the Lloigor", in which the Voynich manuscript turns out to be a copy of the Necronomicon.
With the success of the Simon Necronomicon the controversy surrounding the actual existence of the Necronomicon was such that a detailed book The Necronomicon Files was published in 1998 attempting to prove once and for all the book was pure fiction. It covered the well-known Necronomicons in depth, especially the Simon one, along with a number of more obscure ones. It was reprinted and expanded in 2003.
In 2004, Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred, by occultist Donald Tyson, was published by Llewellyn Worldwide. The Tyson Necronomicon is generally thought to be closer to Lovecraft's vision than other published versions. Donald Tyson has clearly stated that the Necronomicon is fictional, but that has not prevented his book from being the center of some controversy.
Historical "Books of the Dead", such as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, are sometimes described as "real Necronomicons." They should not be confused with the Lovecraft Necronomicon, since their contents are meant to be read to and remembered by the dead, rather than to be used by the living to summon the dead. Lovecraft may have been inspired by these books.
The Astral Necronomicon
Kenneth Grant, the British occultist, disciple of Aleister Crowley, and head of the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis suggested in his book The Magical Revival (1972) that there was an unconscious connection between Crowley and Lovecraft. He thought they both drew on the same occult forces; Crowley via his magic and Lovecraft through the dreams which inspired his stories and the Necronomicon. Grant claimed that the Necronomicon existed as an astral book as part of the Akashic records and could be accessed through ritual magic or in dreams. Grant's ideas on Lovecraft were featured heavily in the introduction to the Simon Necronomicon and also have been backed by Donald Tyson; but Lovecraft, a strict materialist, would likely have been outraged. Like any claim based purely on supernatural evidence, Grant's ideas cannot be proved or disproved and have added further confusion to the issue.
We have been told that our son has an old soul. Our four year old never woke us up screaming in the middle of the night while teething. When sick he played as hard as when he was well. At two years old he was toddling around the house to help us, didn't get into or tear up everything. He never hit the "terrible two's" never got into the "horrific three's" and now that he is four he still has the same laid back, taking everything in stride personality that he has always had. My husband and I feel very blessed to have such a well mannered, calm little guy as he is the exact opposite of our daughter when she was his age.
Just before he turned three and was beginning to have conversations with us, some things that we had observed him doing started making sense. It unnerved us, but in the scheme of things, he was little by little allowing us into his life and letting us know what he sees. Of course, some of it we had to figure out what he was really saying and we may have jumped to some conclusions at first, but once words and their meanings became clearer to him, he gave us great detailed descriptions of what was "bouncing around".
Anyone with children knows that when their child starts the journey into the spoken word, most of it sounds like jumbled words and phrases that do not seem to quite fit the rest of the sentence. With him he had a long issuance of sounds that we did not recognize, the family (immediate and extended) began working heavily with him on the pronunciation of words. Half the time he spoke English (That is technically the only language he had long exposure to. The neighbors spoke Spanish, but rarely to him) and the other half were a combination of clicking and almost humming sounds, so therefore we began looking into speech therapy for him.
We have always enjoyed his imagination. Even now he prefers to be alone with his "friends" but doesn't mind the intrusion when we come in. He regals us with stories of his friends Belle and Justin. We did not want that destroyed. With us being in our late thirties and early forties we know how easy it is to lose the ability to let our minds tell us a story. Plus our daughter had gone through therapy with a psychologist and the results were explosive (That is in a different post). So we were apprehensive about the therapy sessions. Even knowing it was a different therapy, different children, the offices were in the same building, but where we could afford to take him at the time.
He went to two sessions. In the first session the entire hour was video and audio taped. I did not like that. Several years from now someone may be going through old records and find these tapes and there will be my innocent angel up on the screen. I couldn't imagine anything untoward happening, but the unease was there. The second session we watched and listened to bits and pieces of the first while the therapist shook her head and told us that on initial observation, it would appear that he was talking to someone and waiting for answers. In her opinion, he was just having fun with a friend and he had "made up" a language that they could have secret conversations with. She recommended a psychologist.
After two consultations, we decided that no further action would be taken. We would just patiently try to teach him to slow down and enunciate words. That would be the solution. There was nothing in his life pointing to a psychological problem, he was just having problems with words.
Then he said the darnedest thing. We have an open relationship with our children. They are encouraged to come to either one of us with anything and we TRY to, with an open mind, help, support and love them through anything that they are going through. My terminally ill father-in-law lives with us (Higher Power love him for hanging on this long) so religion is a big part of our lives, but we do not discuss the "ins and outs" of life before and after our physical being with our four year old. ANY conversation to that effect is usually with my daughter and in a room with a closed door out of respect to my father-in-law who is on that brink.
One day we were checking out Daddy's race car (He races a mini-stock locally, nothing big and fancy, just an old mustang) and our son was playing in the drivers seat. Out of the blue he says something to the effect of:
"This is why I chose you, Daddy..."
Smiling, Daddy asked him how he was able to choose him when he was a miracle baby that surprised both Mama and Daddy.
He told us that while he was up in Heaven checking out all the Mama's and Daddy's and trying to pick out the perfect ones, he noticed Sissy first. She needed help. Then he noticed Daddy. Our son would sit on a cloud with his feet hanging down and swinging and just watching him. He liked what he saw and began checking me out. He knows that something was keeping Mama from having another baby, but he wanted us, so he came. He said his Daddy needed someone else to love as he had such a good heart and he knew there was enough to go around. Daddy would need help with his hobbies and needed a boy to hang out with.
Some facts: Between the birth of our daughter, now fifteen, and our son, now four, we had three miscarriages. We were told that I am just not a natural born baby carrier, and we should just "be happy" with the child that we had (My husband has three other children by a previous marriage that he was prevented in seeing by the ex-wife. Big ugly mess that whole thing is) and accept that there would be no others. At three months pregnant I began having difficulties, almost lost him, and was put on complete bed rest. While in a depressed state I was introduced to my Spirit Guide (a White Buffalo) who literally carried me through. I am Italian and, no blonds or red heads in as many generations that my parents have knowledge of. My husband is half Cherokee Indian, quarter Blackfoot. His father is Cherokee, his mother Cherokee/Blackfoot. No blonde's there. Our son is blond and blue eyed. His name has the number three in it.
I'm not sure that numerology has any kind of play into this. I'm not sure I believe that things can be determined by numerology. Then again, I'm not sure how numerology works. But all the threes... My Guide and my son have the same color hair. Would anyone happen to have some kind of explanation on how he came up with the Heaven story or why he seems to act older than four? And what with the made up language that he still slips into on occasion, any one know what that may be?
To Banish Unwanted Spirits
You Need: Sea salt
Surround yourself with a white light to protect you while you work
For some reason, and it has always been like this I have seen things that no one else can. Some things are images of demons, and some are of nice spirits checking up on there family and close friends. But this one experience has got my mind going crazy for a long time.
I was at the beach last summer. I was waiting for the elevator on the first floor and I was reading one of the pamphlets they had on the rack, when I saw this man running into the hotel. Like seriously though, no one even put their head up to see the man. He was screaming and running like super fast and no one even bothered looking at him. When I turned to say, hey you ok he was gone. After that the elevator came down, I kept thinking I only turned around for 2 seconds and I would of heard the man take off but it was like he vanished into thin air. By the time I got up to my floor I was shaking. When I was walking through the hall I looked through the big glass window that stretches from the elevator and the end of the hall. While I was standing there I saw that same man run across the street and when he crossed the trolley lane, SMACK! He had hit the side of the trolley and went through the whole thing. I could not believe it he actually walked through the trolley.
The next day when we were at the beach that same man came walking down the beach and he was all dressed in black. He asked me where the nearest funeral home was and I said well I don't live here I am just a visitor from Pennsylvania. He said ok, thank you anyway. I said why do you ask? He replied because I have to go to my funeral. I nearly spit out my soda when he said that, I was that scared I ran into the ocean and was so focused on what happened I stumbled over the wave. And got salt water in my eyes. I got up and my dad said hey you ok? I said I am fine, but I just well wasn't paying attention. He said just be careful. I never saw the ghost man again.
It was a dark, rainy afternoon in Bamberg, Germany, but Fr. G. Ronald Murphy wasn’t about to let inclement weather thwart his quest. The Jesuit priest, a professor in Georgetown University’s German Department and scholar of medieval literature, was not looking for an obscure manuscript or a quiet refuge in which to spend his sabbatical. Rather, he was seeking the single object that has had the power to capture the imaginations of men and women for centuries, a relic which has inspired works of art ranging from the Arthurian legend and The Da Vinci Code to Indiana Jones and Monty Python. He was looking for the Holy Grail.
The prize, which Murphy believed to be held in Bamberg’s diocesan museum, wasn’t just any Grail—it was the object which, he believes, inspired Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Middle High German epic Parzival, which he dates to approximately 1210 AD. According to Wolfram’s tale, the Grail was not a serving dish or a chalice, as it has often been portrayed, but rather a green gemstone embedded in a portable Catholic altar.
“But what is the Holy Grail?” Murphy asks in his book Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival, published in 2006 by Oxford Press. A fine question indeed, considering the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of objects which faithful have claimed to be the one true Holy Grail over the years.
Widely considered the greatest Crusades historian in the world, Cambridge University professor Jonathan Riley-Smith identified the Grail in an email as “a creation of Chrétien de Troyes,” who wrote the original Arthurian myth on the subject of the mysterious relic.
In his masterpiece Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal (Perceval or The Story of the Grail), written between 1180 and 1185 AD, Chrétien identified the holy object as a golden serving dish studded with jewels which magically served the inhabitants of a mysterious castle under a curse, Murphy writes in Gemstone. The French epic, which fused Christian tradition with Celtic myth, would inspire storytellers (including Wolfram himself) for centuries to come—even though Chrétien died before he could finish it.
Many authors later attempted to bring Chrétien’s story to a conclusion by supplying their own “continuations,” Murphy writes, the most influential of these writers being Robert de Boron. Robert’s Joseph d’ Arimathie (Joseph of Arimathea), written between 1200 and 1210 AD, not only changed the Grail from a dish to the chalice used at the Last Supper, it tied the legend to Joseph of Arimathea who, according to Robert, used the vessel to collect the blood seeping from Jesus’s wounds as he hung from the cross.
Father Murphy and his Viking ship is setting sail for history
Lynn Kirshbaum
Unlike the French-language epics of Chrétien and Robert, Murphy explains in his book that Wolfram’s Parzival, written in German, was not read “in France, England, and beyond,” preventing it from achieving the widespread popularity across Medieval Europe of the other two narratives. Despite the story’s lack of popularity, however, Murphy, along with most Grail scholars, believes Wolfram’s narrative is the best of all because it focuses the reader’s attention not on a physical relic that must be discovered, but on the Sacramental mystery of the Holy Communion which was already present.
“Where Chrétien wove together Celtic and Christian motifs,” Murphy explains in Gemstone, “Wolfram wove together Muslim and Christian, husband and wife, astronomy and medicine, the contemporary and the ancient, into an incredibly rich medieval humanistic Christian tapestry.”
Chrétien’s myth was written in France in the 1180s while the Christians had control of Jerusalem, Murphy noted in an interview with the Voice. Wolfram, on the other hand, wrote Parzival after 1187, when Muslim forces recaptured Jerusalem, which created a vastly different historical context for his narrative.
Christendom had fallen into a “slump,” he says, and by the Fourth Crusade, the Christian soldiers were frustrated and needed money. So they attacked Constantinople, the capital of the Christian East.
Initially, “one of the two purposes for crusading was to help the Easterners,” Murphy said. “The other was to recover the Holy Sepulcher.”
This “fratricide” on the part of the crusaders, Murphy argues in his book, explains why Wolfram changed the nature of the Grail from a dish to a stone.
Roughly the size of a cigar box, a medieval altar stone cutout housed the relics of saints and three pieces of the Holy Communion—the Body of Christ—covered by a lid. This stone was called the “Sepulchrum,” Murphy explained, a sort of miniature Holy Sepulcher.
“Every priest and chaplain among the crusaders had one in his saddle bags—that’s my argument,” Murphy said. “There’s no need to go to Jerusalem and to kill Muslims to acquire the Holy Sepulcher.”
According to Murphy, Wolfram uses a “frame story” to further his argument against crusading: a man has two sons, one by a black Muslim woman and another (Parzival, knight of the round table) by a Christian queen. Years later, the two brothers, blinded by their helmets, fight and nearly kill each other. They quickly realize their folly, however, recognizing that they have a common father—symbolic of Christianity and Islam’s common father of Abraham and, ultimately, God.
This altar stone may be the inspiration for Wolfram’s Perzival
courtesy Father Murphy
“So, it’s a powerful argument that going to Jerusalem and attempting to kill to recover the Holy Sepulcher is unnecessary and unwanted, because you and the Muslims are brothers. You have a common father,” Murphy explained. “To kill kin is a serious sin.”
Gemstone of Paradise is not the first book Murphy has written on German literature, a passion he attributes to his upbringing in Trenton, N.J., “the only U.S. city to be occupied by a German army,” he quips, referring to the Hessian mercenaries employed by Great Britain in 1776.
The joke doesn’t end there. While searching for the former home of the Brothers Grimm in the Hessian town of Hanau, Murphy gave the same dry-witted introduction to a man who lived in the village.
“Which regiments?” the German villager asked. Murphy told him the two he could remember, to which the man replied that the soldiers were from a village 15 kilometers away.
“I thought these people really have a sense of history being still present,” he said. “More than we do, more than we do.”
A kind, soft-spoken man quick to find the positive, spiritual meanings of all things, Murphy would have fit in well in such a village. Even his sparsely decorated office exuded a German spirit in its cleanliness and functionality.
An interest in astronomy early in his life prompted Murphy to study German, the de rigueur foreign language of budding American scientists at the time.
“It was like learning early English….It seemed like I was being taught my mother tongue,” he said.
After joining the Society of Jesus, Murphy was forced to choose between astronomy and German for his Ph.D. studies. He chose the latter, realizing that it was his true passion.
Murphy’s earliest interest in German literature, he explained, was the celebrated dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who became the focus of his dissertation at Harvard. In the paper, Murphy argued that Brecht, an avowed communist, used Biblical imagery and quotations not always to satirize Christianity, as many believed at the time, but often to make his plays more appealing and grabbing. Thus, Brecht was more than just “a good communist”—he was a good human being as well, Murphy said. The dissertation eventually became Murphy’s first book, Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht’s Drama of Mortality and the City, which provoked a hailstorm of both praise and criticism.
Murphy then set his sights on the oldest known epic in German literature, The Heliand, which couches the Gospel in Beowulf-like terms for its Saxon audience, casting Jesus as a chieftain and his apostles as warriors. His insights into the epic’s adaptation of Christian language into terms popular with the Saxons formed the basis for The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand, published in 1989, and The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, published in 1992.
Such adaptations of Biblical images and language are “aimed at moving you as a person … speaking in your categories,” he said. Parzival is no exception.
top of the altar stone
courtesy Father Murphy
“This is the most beautiful anti-Crusading book ever written,” Murphy explained, “because it’s written in the most popular story of its day: the Grail [story]. And secondly … this is more Christian than Christianity. It’s arguing against Crusading because…of the nature of love.”
*
Murphy’s highly original analysis of Wolfram’s Grail, which Gemstone of Paradise elucidates in detail, has been well received by critics and academics in the field, earning the book awards from the New Jersey Council of Humanities, the Mythopoeic Society, and the American Library Association.
In an interview with the Voice, Riley-Smith described Murphy’s association of the Grail with the altar in Bamberg (which Murphy has named the “Paradise Altar” because of its artistic allusions to the rivers of Paradise) as “very convincing,” though he admitted he is not an expert on Parzival and points out that Crusades historians tend to not be very interested in the Grail.
According to Riley-Smith, the Grail is “the greatest and most enduring literary invention of all time.” Accordingly, it has largely been left to the expertise of literary scholars to unveil the relic’s deepest secrets. Still, as Murphy would eventually discover, in its own way the Grail offers a significant contribution to the study of Crusades history.
Indeed, Murphy’s interpretation of Parzival fits within, and even bolsters, Riley-Smith’s revolutionary historical framework of the Crusades. Prior to Riley-Smith, historians interpreted the Crusades as “nothing but a modern economic venture, just an attempt by poor third and fourth sons to acquire land somewhere because their family wasn’t going to give them any,” Murphy said.
After spending months in dark European monasteries hunched over deeds entrusted to the monasteries by crusaders, Riley-Smith found that most of the deeds were to entire castles. This led him to conclude that, in general, it was the father of the household who went on crusade for the salvation of his soul and to do pious work for Jesus—hardly the self-serving motive originally posited.
“The Crusades were done out of real, genuine piety, not a cynical desire to grab money,” Murphy said. Furthermore, he argued, Wolfram’s opposition to the Crusades, because it is framed in religious terms, proves how much the crusaders were motivated by religious beliefs.
“If you had guys who were killing Muslims because it’s worth a lot of money,” Murphy said, “do you think arguing, ‘Hey, this isn’t very Trinitarian’ will stop them? But if they are pious and religious and holy, and they are hacking away out of love of Jesus Christ, you can talk to them.”
Murphy admits he initially feared Riley-Smith would see his argument—especially its emphasis on Wolfram’s anti-crusade message—as a contradiction of his historical model, prompting Murphy to send an email to Riley-Smith explaining how the two arguments are, in fact, complementary.
However, Riley-Smith “saw that right away,” Murphy explained.
Many other prominent scholars have also taken Murphy’s side, including Rachel Fulton, a University of Chicago history professor who claims expertise in Parzival, which she teaches as part of her courses on the history of European civilization.
“Fr. Murphy has given us an exceptionally insightful reading of a complex story that works on literary, theological, and historical grounds,” she wrote in an email.
Albrecht Classen, an expert in medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture at the University of Arizona, likewise praised Murphy’s work in a recent email to the Voice.
“He succeeds in connecting Wolfram’s Parzival with fundamental Christian teachings about love, family, and friends that extends far beyond the narrow limits of one religion against another,” he wrote.
But Gemstone of Paradise is more than just a work of literary analysis: its first and final chapters chart Murphy’s search for and, he claims, successful discovery of the very Grail which inspired Wolfram’s epic. It’s a bold claim, but one which Murphy defends rather ardently.
Based on the research of Josef Braun, S.J., who in the 1920s catalogued nearly every type of altar in existence in Europe, Murphy concluded that there were only two medieval portable altars still in existence with the artistic motifs described in Parzival—one in Brussels and one in Bamberg.
“Because Bamberg is in Franconia, Wolfram’s heartland, and because there is a possibility that Bamberg is mentioned at one point in the narrative … and because its portable altar was in the reliquary-box form, I believe that the altar at Bamberg is the one that inspired Wolfram,” Murphy writes in the book’s final chapter.
So, like the tomb-raiding, fictionalized professor we often associate with Harrison Ford, Murphy set off in search of the object of his fancy.
After making a five-hour drive to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels with no results to show for it, Murphy decided to call the director of the diocesan museum in Bamberg.
“[He] told me that they had the object that I had described but that I was wrong about any depiction of the rivers of Paradise on it,” Murphy writes. “‘Only the twelve apostles,’ he said.”
It was at this point when, Murphy whispered as he related his remembrances, he received a message from what he believes may be his guardian angel.
“Go anyway, you fool!” the voice commanded from inside Murphy’s head. And so he went.
As Murphy and the museum’s director ascended the winding stairway which led to the exhibition hall, the director turned to Murphy, smiled and said, “I was mistaken about the rivers of Paradise … On top are not only the rivers of Paradise depicted around the stone but also the four trees of the Garden of Paradise,” Murphy writes in Gemstone.
Murphy’s heart leapt at the news, which confirmed that the altar’s features matched the description contained in Parzival—with only one question let unanswered: is the stone green?
The stone, Murphy was overjoyed to discover, was indeed green. According to the priest, Wolfram’s relic was more than the figment of one writer’s wild imagination—it was a real, tangible object of Christian piety.
“The exciting aspect of Prof. Murphy’s findings is…that he is able to trace the descriptions of the Holy Grail in Parzival to a very real object, thereby linking the work of imagination and artistic creativity to something real, grounded in the religious practices of the time,” Peter Pfeiffer, a professor in Georgetown’s German Department, wrote in an email.
However, scholars disagree over whether the altar stone of Bamberg, Germany, is actually the Grail which inspired Wolfram’s narrative.
In her review of the book for Reader’s Report, Fulton declares Gemstone of Paradise to be “a sophisticated, challenging and rigorous theological reading of Wolfram’s masterpiece wrapped up in a successful quest for the Holy Grail—or, at least, Wolfram’s Grail…”
Others are more skeptical of the discovery, though, including Classen, who calls the connection between the physical object—the green gemstone—and the literary discussion “tenuous at best.”
Murphy “seems to have found an object which Wolfram might have had in mind, and which would have deeply influenced his thinking, but it is not, and never will be, a perfect match,” Classen wrote in an email.
Still, Classen admitted that Murphy “is on fairly solid ground to suggest that the vicinity of Bamberg, with its altar/Grail object, and Wolfram’s birthplace south of it matters greatly.”
Most of the scholars consulted for this article do agree, however, that the importance of Wolfram’s epic—and Murphy’s book—lies not in the physical existence of the Grail, but rather in the deeper theological meaning the altar stone conveys.
Though she believes Murphy has found Wolfram’s Grail—or at least that the discovery is “very, very likely,” as she qualified in an interview with the Voice—in her review, Fulton identifies Murphy’s main contribution as “the reading of Wolfram’s work as itself a theologically sophisticated rebuff to his own contemporaries who would look for the Grail not at home or, sacramentally, already in their midst, but rather in the possession of the Muslims in the city of Jerusalem, lost to the Crusaders with the conquests of Saladin.”
Likewise, Classen recognized that “the ultimate purpose of [Murphy’s] investigation” was not merely to discover the Grail, but rather to show that “Wolfram rewrote the story of the Holy Grail in such a way as to tell the Christian world what the passion for fighting and dominance … signified about the state of Christendom in his day.”
So does the “True” Holy Grail really exist? Though many have found Murphy’s claim to be plausible, none of the scholars consulted believes there existed, or currently exists, a one true Grail—at least not in the form of a relic.
Like Murphy, Prof. Fulton believes Wolfram was right: “the true ‘Grail’ is the altar on which we celebrate Mass,” she said. Murphy’s Gemstone, Fulton argues in her review, is “a powerful wake-up call to pay careful attention to the theological arguments embedded in what many of us would prefer to read as … secular texts.”
As Murphy explains in Gemstone of Paradise, Wolfram ties the Grail “neither to the objects of the Last Supper nor to the relics of the Crucifixion, but rather to those of Holy Saturday—and to the present,” rendering its pious message—much like the legend of the Grail itself—timeless.
