of being guardians of the (here) sacred and most Christian relic, the Holy Grail.[1]
Now, in the light of the parallels already cited, is it not at least possible that these weeping maidens, who wail so mysteriously through the Grail story, are a survival of, and witness to, the original source of that story, that they are the mourning women of the Adonis ritual, the 'Women weeping for Tammuz'?
This interpretation would also explain the constant stress laid upon the general mourning, even when the reason for this mourning appears inadequate, as e.g. in the Parzival. Here we are told that the appearance of the bleeding Lance is the signal for such lamentation that "The folk of thirty kingdoms could scarce have bemoaned them more," Bk. v. 1. 130. Here certainly the Lance is that with which the king has been wounded, but the folk of the castle are in no way affected, there is no wasting of the land.
Again, in Peredur, at the appearance of the Lance all fell to wailing and lamentation, but here there seems to be no connection between the Lance and the wound of the king, which latter is the work of the sorceresses of Gloucester. If the original source of the story is to be found in the Adonis ritual, and if the mourning which is so marked a feature of that ritual be associated, as Drs. Robertson Smyth and Farnell have suggested, rather with the death of the god than with the consequent failure of vegetation,[2] then we might expect to find the association of the mourning with the weapon which originally dealt the fatal blow to persist in versions which had dropped out the (originally) companion feature of the Wasted Land.
We have thus the following important points of contact between the Adonis ritual and the story of the Visit to
