Nor does the explanation given of the Lance agree with the description; the stream of blood, which pours continuously from the weapon, and is carried out of the hall, whither, we are not told, can have no connection with the carefully-guarded relic of the Saint Sang. In truth, we may say without hesitation that the whole machinery of the story is definitely non-Christian, and that the explanation of its peculiarities must be sought outside the range of ecclesiastical tradition. At the same time certain of these features are repeated in a persistent fashion, even in the most definitely ecclesiasticised versions; a peculiarity which, I think, justifies the supposition that they form a part of the original Grail tradition.
Now it has seemed to me that an explanation of the most characteristic features of our story may be found in the suggestion that they are a survival, misunderstood and imperfectly remembered, of a form of Nature worship closely allied to, if not identical with, the Rites of Adonis so exhaustively studied by Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough. It will be remembered that the essence of these rites was the symbolic representation of the annual processes of Nature, the sequence and transition of the seasons. The god, Adonis, or Tammuz, or whatever he was called in the land where the rites were celebrated, typified the vivifying principle of vegetation; his death was mourned as the death of vegetation in winter, his restoration to life was hailed as its restoration in spring. An effigy representing the dead god was honoured with all the rites of mourning, and subsequently committed to the waves. Women especially played so large a part in these rites that an Arabic writer of the tenth century refers to the festival as El-Bugât, 'the festival of the Weeping Women.'[1]
The central motif of the Gawain Grail-story is, I
- ↑ Cf. Legend of Sir Perceval, pp. 330-36; The Golden Bough—under heading 'Adonis.' Adonis, Allis, Osiris, chap. viii.
