by Perceval is the Land of Shades. In popular tradition the incident takes the form of entry into the hollow hill-side where the fairy king holds his court and hoards untold riches. Poverty and simplicity are the frequent qualifications of the successful quester; oftener still some mystic birthright, the being a Sunday's child for instance, or a seventh son; or again freedom from sin is required, and, perhaps, most frequently maidenhood.[1] The stress which so many peoples lay upon virginity in the holy prophetic maidens, who can transport themselves into the otherworld and bring thence the commands of the god, may be noted in the same connection. No Celtic tale I have examined with a view to throwing light upon the Grail romances insists upon this idea, but some version, now lost, may possibly have done so. Celtic tradition gave the romance writers of the Middle Ages material and form for the picture of human love; it may also have given them a hint of the opposing ideal of chastity.[2]
All this time it should be noted that no real progress is made in the symbolical machinery of the legend. The Holy Grail becomes superlatively sacrosanct, but it retains its pristine pagan essence, even in the only version, the Grand St. Graal, which knew of Borron and of his mystical conception.
Such, then, had been the growth of the legend in one direction. The original incidents were either transformed, mutilated, or, where they kept their first shape, underwent no ethical deepening or widening. The talismans themselves had been transferred from Celtic to Christian mythology, but their fate was still bound
- ↑ Cf. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, II, 811, and his references.
- ↑ The ideas held by many peoples in a primitive stage of culture respecting virginity are worthy careful study. Some physiological basis may be found for them in the phenomena of hysteria, which must necessarily have appeared to such peoples evidences of divine or demoniac possession, and at that stage are hardly likely to have been met with save among unmarried women. In the French witch trials these phenomena are often presented by nuns, in whose case they were probably the outcome of a life at once celibate and inactive. On the other hand the persons accused of witchcraft were as a rule of the most abandoned character, and it is a, morally speaking, degraded class which has furnished Professor Charcot and his pupils with the subjects in whom they have identified all the phenomena that confront the student of witch trials.
