Henry of Blois 

Jessie Weston, in Ritual to Romance, expanded on James Frazer’s theory of a dying-god to propose that the legends of the Holy Grail were founded on the fertility themes of the Ancient Mysteries, like those of Attis and Mithras, mediated by Gnostic Christianity, where the central myth was a “Eucharistic” Feast, in which the worshippers partook of the Food of Life from the sacred vessels. The book's main focus is on the Holy Grail tradition and its influence, particularly the Wasteland, a Celtic motif that ties the barrenness of a land with a curse that must be lifted by a hero. The book is mostly dismissed today, as it likely revealed too much. Nevertheless, the work was mentioned by T.S. Eliot in the notes to his poem, The Waste Land. The book appears in Francis Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, among those kept by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, along with Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The book also appears in the Oliver Stone film The Doors.

The Gnostic content of the legends of the Holy Grail is associated with the spread of the influence of the Sepher ha-Bahir to Southern France, centered in Septimania, which became known as the Languedoc, contributed to the emergence of the heretical sect of the Cathars associated with the Templars. And it was a network of dynastic families descended from Guillaume de Gelllone—that included Henry II King of England (1133 – 1189), Henry of Blois (1096 – 1171), nephew of Templar founder Hugh of Champagne, and Henry’s nephew Henry I, Count of Champagne (1127 – 1181)—who were at the center of the authorship of these various early legends. The actual author is not proven but Hank Harrison was the first, in 1992, to suggest that Henri of Blois was the author of the Perlesvaus.[1] The fact that the Grail sagas are concerned with a secret and purportedly sacred lineage is indicated in the Perlesvaus, where we read: “Here is the story of thy descent; here begins the Book of the Sangreal.”

Henry of Blois was a younger son of the crusader Stephen, Count of Blois by Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders. Adela of Normandy’s brother, Henry I of England, married Matilda of Scotland, the daughter of Malcolm III and Saint Margaret, daughter of Agatha of Bulgaria. Adela, who would become a nun at Cluny, conceived their youngest son Henry of Blois during the single year Stephen was in France between his time in the crusades. At two years of age, Henry was pledged to the Church at Cluny Abbey, as an oblate child, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Peter the Venerable. In 1126, Henry I of England invited his nephew Henry of Blois to England as abbot of Glastonbury, and in 1129 appointed him Bishop of Winchester in Hampshire.

Genealogy of Henry of Blois

• Stephen II, Count of Blois (leader of the Princes’ Crusade and stepbrother of Hugh of Champagne, founder of the Templars in contact with Rashi) + Adela of Normandy (d. of William the Conqueror)

  • Theobald II of Champagne + Matilda of Carinthia.

    • Theobald V, Count of Blois (involved in blood libel through affair with Jewess Pulcelina of Blois) + Alix of France (d. of Louis VII + Eleanor of Aquitaine)

    • Henry I of Champagne + Marie of France (d. of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Hosted Walter Map, the author of the Skull of Sidon legend. Sponsored Grail author Chrétien de Troyes)

      • Henry II (1166–1197) + Queen Isabella I of Jerusalem (g-d of Baldwin II and Morphia of Armenia of Walter Map’s “Skull of Sidon” legend)

      • Marie of Champagne + Baldwin I, Latin Emperor

      • Theobald III of Champagne + Blanche of Navarre, Countess of Champagne

    • Adela of Champagne + King Louis VII of France

    • Marie of Champagne + Odo II, Duke of Burgundy

  • Stephen, King of England (suppressed blood libel case of William of Norwich) + Matilda I, Countess of Boulogne (d. of Eustace III, b. of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I of Jerusalem)

  • Henry of Blois, Abbot of Glastonbuy, Bishop of Winchester (author of Perlesvaus, and used Geoffrey of Monmouth as a nom de plume to write Historia Regum Britanniae, which was largely responsible for formulating the image of Arthur)

Henry of Blois’ brother was Stephen, King of England (1092/6 – 1154), who was involved in suppressing an investigation into the first blood libel case against the Jews Europe, which involved an accusation of ritual murder. Stephen I married the daughter of Eustace III, brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade. Eustace III’s wife was Mary Scots, daughter of David I of Scotland, sponsor of the Templars. Henry of Blois’ other brother was Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090 – 1152), who inherited the titles of their uncle Hugh of Champagne. Theobald II was among the delegates at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to endorse the recognition of the Templars.

Shortly after his brother Stephen’s death in 1154 and the accession of Henry II as King of England, Henry of Blois retired to Cluny, for at least two years and mourned there his mentor Peter the Venerable, who died on Christmas Day, 1156. Henry II, who claimed descent from King Arthur, was the son of Geoffrey V of Anjou (1113 – 1151), founder of the Plantagenet dynasty. Geoffrey V married Matilda of England, the daughter of Henry I of England, the son of William the Conqueror. Matilda’s mother was Matilda of Scotland, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and Saint Margaret, the daughter of Edward the Exile and Agatha of Bulgaria. Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine after she married Louis VII of France. Early on in her life, Matilda preferred the well-established Benedictine monastery of Cluny.[2] In later years, she directed her attention to the Cistercian order, whose dedication to the Virgin Mary was of particular importance to her.[3]

Joseph of Arimathea

Christian legends have claimed that the Glastonbury abbey was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the first century. Grail literature divides into two classes, the first concerning King Arthur’s knights visiting the Grail castle or questing after the object, and the second concerns the Grail’s history in the time of Joseph of Arimathea. It was Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, when he heard of Jesus’ death, who requested from Pontius Pilate permission to remove the body. Joseph of Arimathea then retrieved the body, and placed it in what was to be his own tomb, an act witnessed by Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary.” Then, according to Matthew 27:62-66:

The next day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, “After three days I will rise again.” So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.” “Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.” So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard.

By this time, Joseph would have already removed the body, and conspired with the two Marys to spread the rumor that Jesus had resurrected from the dead. Those disciples mentioned in the Gospels as spreading the message were the two Marys, but also Salome. There is some contention as to the exact identity of Salome, who appears briefly in the canonical gospels, and who appears in more detail in apocryphal writings. However, one Salome was the step-daughter of Herod Antipas, and danced before Herod and her mother Herodias at the occasion of Herod’s birthday, birthday, who had John the Baptist beheaded at her request. According to Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities:

Herodias, [...], was married to Herod, the son of Herod the Great, who was born of Mariamne, the daughter of Simon the high priest, who had a daughter, Salome; after whose birth Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of our country, and divorced herself from her husband while he was alive, and was married to Herod, her husband’s brother by the father’s side, he was tetrarch of Galilee; but her daughter Salome was married to Philip, the son of Herod, and tetrarch of Trachonitis; and as he died childless, Aristobulus, the son of Herod, the brother of Agrippa, married her; they had three sons, Herod, Agrippa, and Aristobulus.[4]

Mary Magdalene, one of the two, is usually identified as the woman out of which Jesus exorcised seven demons, or with Mary of Bethany, and the woman sinner, who anointed Jesus’ feet. She is also identified with the adulterous woman Jesus saved from stoning by the Pharisees. But if Mary Magdalene came to be identified with harlotry, it is because of an esoteric interpretation which regards her as a “sacred prostitute,” who officiates at the mysteries, or as goddess and consort to the “son of god,” as she is featured in the Gnostic texts. Mary Magdalene is a central figure in later Gnostic Christian writings, including the Dialogue of the Savior, the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary. These texts portray Mary Magdalene as an apostle, as Jesus’ closest or most beloved disciple and the recipient of his most private teachings.

Legends that associate Britain with the Holy Grail begin as early as the eighth century AD, when Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, stated in the Life of Mary Magdalene that Joseph of Arimathea was sent to Britain accompanied by Mary Magdalene, Lazarus and Salome. Joseph was to have concealed the Holy Grail for safekeeping at Glastonbury Tor, where he established the first church in Britain Isles, which developed into Glastonbury Abbey. The legend of Arimathea’s travels to Britain were eventually encapsulated in the famous hymn of William Blake, “And did those feet in ancient time.”

The legend that Joseph was given the responsibility of keeping the Holy Grail was the product of Robert de Boron, a French poet of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, according to whom the grail was not only the cup of the Last Supper, but the vessel used to capture Christ’s blood after the Crucifixion. Symbolically, the Grail is the cup that receives the divine blood of the god, like the sacred bowl of the Mysteries of Mithras.

In subsequent romances such as Perlesvaus, Joseph himself travels to Britain, bringing relics with him. In the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, an extensive Arthurian composition that derived much from Robert de Boron, it is not Joseph but his son Josephus who is the important figure. Such stories were inspired by the account of John of Glastonbury, who wrote Cronica Sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie (“Chronicles or Antiquities of the Glastonbury Church”) around 1350, and according to whom Joseph, when he arrived in Britain, brought with him vessels containing the blood and sweat of Christ, though he did not use the word “Grail.”[5]

King Arthur

John of Glastonbury’s Cronica drew extensively on De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie by William of Malmesbury, a close friend of Henry of Blois.[6] John further claims that one of Joseph of Arimathea’s descendants was King Arthur. However, Gildas’ sixth-century polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”), mentions the Battle of Badon, where Arthur is said to have single-handedly killed 960 men, but does not mention him. Arthur is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or named in any surviving manuscript written between 400 and 820.[7] Arthur is not mentioned in Bede’s early eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, another major early source for the history of Badon.

Otherwise, it was Geoffrey of Monmouth who was largely responsible for formulating the image of Arthur as is was inherited by later writers. The Historia Brittonum, a ninth-century work traditionally attributed to Nennius, linked Brutus of Troy to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War, and thus provided raw material for later mythographers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. The textual sources for Arthur are usually divided into those written before Geoffrey’s Historia and those written afterwards, which could not avoid his influence.

According to Francis Lot, author of The Island of Avalon, Henry Blois, used Geoffrey of Monmouth as a nom de plume to compose the pseudo-historical Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”), written between 1135 and 1139, and was responsible for the Prophecies of Merlin.[8] By drawing on classical authors, the Bible, and Celtic tradition, Monmouth created the story of a British kingdom, to some extent paralleling that of Ancient Israel. Monmouth relates the purported history of Britain, from its first settlement by Brutus, a heroic son of Silvius, son of Ascanius, son of Aeneas a hero of the Trojan war, to the death of Cadwallader in the seventh century, covering Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain, two of its kings, Leir and Cymbeline, later immortalized by William Shakespeare, and one of the earliest developed narratives of King Arthur. Likewise, the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar had developed a family story that their ancestor Iulus had been identical with Aeneas’s son Ascanius, who scholars have connected to Ashkenaz, one of the descendants of Noah according to Genesis.[9]

Geoffrey’s Merlin was based mostly on the prophet and madman Myrddin Wyllt, also known as “Myrddin the Wild,” of medieval Welsh legend. Merlin was also inspired by Emrys, a character based in part on the fifth-century historical Roman leader Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was mentioned by Nennius. In Nennius’ account, Ambrosius was discovered when the British king Vortigern attempted to erect a tower at Dinas Emrys, which collapsed before completion. Vortigen’s wise men advised him that the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a child born without a father. When brought before the king, Ambrosius, who was rumored to be such a child, revealed that below the foundation of the tower was a lake containing two dragons, battling into each other. Vortigern excavates the hill, freeing the dragons, and the red dragon finally defeats the white. The boy tells Vortigern that the white dragon symbolizes the Saxons and that the red dragon symbolizes the people of Vortigern, who became the Welsh and continued to use the red dragon as their heraldic symbol.

Geoffrey retold the story in his Historia Regum Britanniæ with some embellishments, and gives the fatherless child the name of Merlin Ambrosius, begotten on a king's daughter by an incubus demon. According to Geoffrey’s account, Merlin creates Stonehenge as a burial place for Aurelius Ambrosius, and by his magic enables the new British king Uther Pendragon to enter into Tintagel Castle in disguise and to father his son Arthur with his enemy’s wife, Igerna (Igraine). On Uther Pendragon’s death, the fifteen-year-old Arthur succeeds him as King of Britain and fights a series of battles, similar to those in the Historia Brittonum, culminating in the Battle of Bath. He then defeats the Picts and Scots before creating an Arthurian empire through his conquests of Ireland, Iceland and the Orkney Islands. After twelve years of peace, Arthur sets out to expand his empire once more, taking control of Norway, Denmark and Gaul. Arthur and his warriors, including Kay, Bedivere and Gawain, defeat the Roman emperor Lucius Tiberius in Gaul but, as he prepares to march on Rome, Arthur hears that his nephew Mordred—whom he had left in charge of Britain—has married his wife Guinevere and usurped the throne. Arthur returns to Britain and kills Mordred, but he is mortally wounded. He hands the crown to his kinsman Constantine and is taken to the isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds, never to be seen again.

King Arthur was also purportedly related to Constantine the Great. Constantine was also descended from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the grandson of Emperor Trajan. It was the use by Trajan and Marcus Aurelius of the dragon standard, or Draco—which according to Arrian was of originally of Scythian origin—that came to be adopted by the Pendragon family.[10] In Great Britain, later legend, mentioned by Henry of Huntingdon but made popular by Monmouth, claimed that Constantine’s mother Saint Helena was a daughter of the King of Britain, Cole of Colchester, who allied with Constantius to avoid more war between the Britons and Rome. Her grandmother, therefore, would have been Gladys of Britain, who was descended from King Coel of Britain, whose mother was descended from Beli Mawr. From the collection of Welsh pedigrees now known as Harleian manuscript 3859, we learn that Beli Mawr was married to Anna, “cousin of the Virgin Mary,” who was supposedly a daughter of Joseph of Arimathea. This led to the fabrication that Joseph’s wife was the daughter of Longinus, the Roman soldier who had pierced the crucified Christ’s side with a lance, and that Longinus was an illegitimate son of Julius Caesar himself.[11]

Beli Mawr would also have been descended from the Trojan Brutus. Beli appears in Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae as the British king Heli, son of Digueillus and father of Lud, Cassivellaunus and Nennius. Gerald of Wales wrote in the 1190s that “the Welsh bards, singers and jongleurs kept accurate copies of the genealogies of these princes [of north and south Wales] in their old manuscripts, which are, of course, written in Welsh. They would recite them from memory, going back from Rhodri Mawr to the time of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and then further still to [Brutus’s father] Silvius, Ascanius and Aeneas. They then continue the line back to Adam himself.”[12]

True Cross

Henry I, Count of Champagne was also associated with the legend of the True Cross, a large fragment of a wooden cross, which had been discovered near the Holy Sepulchre by the mother of Constantine, Saint Helena. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, was supposedly constructed on the site where Jesus was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and his empty tomb where he was buried and resurrected. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher became the most sacred church to the Templars, who built churches across the Christian world, such as Tomar and Temple Church, London, that resembled its circular shape.[13]

The thirteenth century The Golden Legend, which became one of the most popular books in medieval Western Europe, by Jacopo de Voragine (c. 1230 – 1298). contains several versions of the origin of the True Cross. In The Life of Adam, Voragine reports that the True Cross came from three trees which grew from three seeds from the “Tree of Mercy” collected by Seth and planted in the mouth of Adam’s corpse. A similar tale is recounted in Of the invention of the Holy Cross, where Voragine wrote that the True Cross came from a tree that grew from part of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or “the tree that Adam ate of”, that Seth planted on Adam’s grave where it “endured there unto the time of Solomon.” The True Cross became the rod of Moses, and David planted it in Jerusalem. It was cut down by Solomon to serve as beam in his Temple, but found not to suitable in the end. After many centuries, the tree was used to build a bridge which the Queen of Sheba traversed on her journey to meet Solomon. On her visit, she told Solomon that a piece of wood from the bridge would bring about the replacement of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. Solomon, fearing the eventual destruction of his people, had the timber buried. After fourteen generations, the wood taken from the bridge was fashioned into the Cross used to crucify Jesus Christ.[14]

Voragine then goes on to describe its finding by Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine.[15] It is said that this burial chamber, supplied by Joseph of Arimathea, was located near the place of Jesus’ execution.[16] Following Jesus’ death, the tomb was venerated by the early Christians. However, the destruction of Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD caused it to fall into neglect. In circa AD 135, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered that a cave containing a rock-cut tomb be filled in to create a flat foundation for a temple dedicated to Jupiter or Venus.[17] In the fourth century, Constantine allegedly sent his mother, Saint Helena, to find Jesus’ burial place in Jerusalem, as well as the so-called “True Cross” upon which Jesus was crucified. With the help of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, and Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, three crosses were found near a tomb, believed to have been Calvary.[18] Constantine then ordered a grand church to be built at the site of the tomb, which is now known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

According to most popular legend of the True Cross, a Jew named Judas Cyriacus, the bishop of Ancona, aided Saint Helena in finding the True Cross. Judas knew of the location of the Cross, as he had been the recipient of that secret knowledge which was handed down the paternal line of his family who suppressed their knowledge that Jesus was the Messiah. As recounted in a Syriac manuscript from the fifth or sixth century, after being coerced through torture by Helena, Judas agreed to reveal the location, and prayed “God, who sits on the chariot of the Cherubs who fly in the air,” after which the three crosses was revealed through miraculous signs. To test which of the three was the one on which Christ was crucified, Judas placed the each in sequence on a corpse, which arose on the third piece:

Then a demon screamed in a man who belonged to Satan, who used to be jealous of beautiful things, and he cried out and said: “Who is this Jesus who did not allow me to receive the souls. Oh, you, Jesus, who drew the whole world towards you, why did you reveal again your Cross to Judas that he should be my opponent? Oh Judas, what have you done? Through the first Judas I effected betrayal and caused the world to sin. Now, however, I am being persecuted by the second Judas.[19]

After assisting Helena with the finding of the True Cross, Judas Cyriacus was baptized by Macarius, consecrated as bishop of Jerusalem Eusebius, and martyred during the persecutions of Emperor Julian the Apostate. The Empress Galla Placidia (388-89 / 392-93 – 450), is said to have presented the city of Ancona in Italy with the relics of Judas Cyriacus. Monte Guasco in Ancona is the location of the Duomo, and is dedicated to Saint Judas Cyriacus. It is said to occupy the site of a temple of Venus, who is mentioned by Catullus and Juvenal as the tutelary deity of the place.[20]

The Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert Abbey or Gellone Abbey, a Benedictine abbey in Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Hérault in France, founded by Guillaume de Gellone, became a very important pilgrimage site in the middle ages due to a claim that a relic of a piece of the True Cross was housed there. Guillaume asked for the gift of a relic of the True Cross from Emperor Charlemagne which had been given to him by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. With the development of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the tenth century, the abbey became a recognized stage on one of the four major routes leading to Compostela.[21] The jeweled reliquary is carried through the village in procession once a year on the St. Guilhem’s feast day on May 3.

Around 1009, the year in which Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christians in Jerusalem hid part of the cross which was discovered by soldiers of the First Crusade. Arnulf Malecorne (d. 1118), the first Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, had the Greek Orthodox priests who were in possession of the Cross tortured in order to reveal its location. Arnulf was the chaplain of the Norman crusader army led by Robert of Normandy, the son of William the Conqueror. The relic that Arnulf discovered was a small fragment of wood embedded in a golden cross, and it became the most sacred relic of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was housed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre under the protection of the Latin Patriarch, who marched with it ahead of the army before every battle. Arnulf accompanied Godfrey of Boullion in the Battle of Ascalon in 1099 with the True Cross. After Baldwin I of Jerusalem presented King Sigurd I of Norway with a splinter of the True Cross, following the Norwegian Crusade in 1110, the Cross was captured by Saladin during the Battle of Hattin in 1187, and while some Christian rulers, like Richard the Lionheart, Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos and Tamar, Queen of Georgia, sought to ransom it from Saladin, the cross was not returned. In 1219 the True Cross was offered to the Knights Templar by Al-Kamil in exchange for lifting the siege on Damietta. The cross was never delivered as Al-Kamil did not, in fact, have it. Subsequently the cross disappeared from historical records.

In 1209, the skull of Saint Judas Cyriacus found in Palestine, was brought back by the knight Milon de Bréban, lord of Chenoise, to Provins in Champagne. Henry I of Champagne decided to have the Saint Quiriace Collegiate Church rebuilt on larger bases in order to be able to contain it. The first collegiate church was founded between the years 1022 and 1032 by Henry I’s great-grandfather Count Odo II of Blois, the grandfather of Stephen, Count of Blois, father of Henry of Blois, and step-brother of Templar founder Hugh of Champagne. Provins also became an important Templar location, the Order having two Preceptories there by the end of the twelfth century, and numerous other properties in and around the town.[22]

Merlin

Arthur’s sorcerer Merlin would have been a Druid, the bardic class that produced the mythical literature and the art of the Celts. Magic was not, wrote Pliny in the first century AD, indigenous either in Greece or in Italy, but was so much at home in Britain and continued with such elaborate ritual that he said it would almost seem as if it was they who taught it to the Persians, not the Persians to them.[23] Astronomy was of prime importance to the Druids, who were said to have had much knowledge of the stars and their motions, of the size of the world, and of natural philosophy. According to Caesar, “they discuss and impart to the youth many things respecting the stars and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods.”[24]

Another Magian doctrine familiar among the Druids was that of reincarnation. According to Caesar: “a lesson which they take particular pains to inculcate is that the soul does not perish, but after death passes from one body into another.”[25] And Diodorus: “among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevails, teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and live again for a fixed number of years inhabited in another body.”[26] According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the Druids were “members of the intimate fellowship of the Pythagorean faith,”[27] and the Christian Father Hippolytus recorded:

And the Celtic Druids investigated to the very highest point the Pythagorean philosophy, after Zalmoxis, by birth a Thracian, a servant of Pythagoras, became to them the originator of this discipline. Now after the death of Pythagoras, Zamolxis, repairing thither, became to them the originator of this philosophy. The Celts esteem these as prophets and seers, on account of their foretelling to them certain (events), from calculations and numbers by the Pythagorean art; on the methods of which very art also we shall not keep silence, since also from these some have presumed to introduce heresies; but the Druids resort to magical rites likewise.[28]

According to Caesar, a notable deity of the Gauls was Dis Pater, or Pluto, the god of the Underworld. From him all the Gauls claimed to be descended, and on this account, says Caesar, they began their reckoning of the twenty-four hours of the day with the oncoming of night. Caesar also reported the existence among the Celts of personal gods with distinct titles and attributes, whom he equates with various figures in the Roman pantheon, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, and so forth, which was exactly what the Gauls themselves did after the conquest. He remarked that they held Hermes to be the chief of the gods, and looked upon him as the inventor of all the arts, as the presiding deity of commerce, and as the guardian of roads and guide of travelers.

Like their Carthaginian and Canaanite forebears, the Celts were reputed to practice human sacrifice. It was said that the Celts would murder a victim by stabbing him in the back, and divine from his struggling.[29] In an early Christian document, the Dinnsenchus, preserved in the Book of Leinster, it is said that the Celts would sacrifice their children to an idol to pray for fertility, “it was milk and corn they asked from it in exchange for their children, how great was their horror and their moaning.”[30] At times, for those gravely sick or in danger of death in battle, huge wickerwork images were filled with living prisoners and criminals, or even innocent victims, including children, and burned alive to seek the favor of the gods.

Following the withdrawal of the Romans in the third century, and even after when St. Patrick had converted the Irish to Christianity, the teachings of the Druids were never completely abandoned, but instead a unique culture developed, known as Celtic Christianity. Soon after its conversion to Christianity, Ireland was covered with monasteries, whose organizations were merely a continuation of the Druidic colleges.[31] Essentially, the arts of the Druids survived early Irish Christianity, as its abundant hagiography, steeped in magical ideas, plainly shows. Saint Columba, abbot and missionary traditionally credited with the main role in the conversion of Scotland to Christianity, after becoming a monk, lived and studied with a bard in Leinster, and later defended the cause of the Druids when their schools and teachings were attacked.[32]

Christian Ireland, as Cahill demonstrates, in How the Irish Saved Civilization, became a bastion of study, and the community of Celtic Christianity was highly prolific in contrast to the rest of Europe, which was eclipsed during the Dark Ages. With their extensive libraries, Irish monasteries attracted students fleeing conflict from many parts of the world to meet there. Large quantities of manuscripts were brought there for safe-keeping and copying. Many pagan writers were studied, and Irish monks knew Greek at a time when knowledge of that language had disappeared from the rest of Europe. The Celtic Christians also seem to have held ongoing contacts with the esoteric schools of Alexandria. Irish records show that seven Egyptian monks were buried at Disert Ulaidh in Ulster. Masses and prayers from apocryphal works used in Egypt were found in Ireland.[33] Irish monasteries were organized in close adherence to those in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, and in many cases, the physical layout and arrangement of the monastic community were identical.[34]

The Jewish tendencies within the Celtic Church were so prominent that it was explicitly accused of Judaism, and its adherents of being Jews.[35] The Sabbath was observed among them, and the Jewish Passover was officially celebrated. The killing of animals for food was performed in accordance with Judaic requirements. Surviving documents of the Celtic Church are full of references to the Jewish apocryphal books and other texts which had long been forbidden in Rome. Monks in general shaved a circular patch on top of the head, while Celtic monks shaved a strip from ear to ear, and while one off Rome’s representatives accused them of wearing the “tonsure of Simon Magus,” Adaman, a distinguished Irishman, freely admitted it.[36]

Finally, the last important figure in the tradition of Celtic Christianity was John Scotus Eriugena (800 – c. 877), the greatest Christian philosopher of the Dark Ages, whose Neoplatonism annoyed Rome, all the while shaping the systems it later adopted. Eriugena’s translations of the works of Christian Neoplatonists, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, made them accessible to Western thinkers. In his principal work, On the Division of Nature, John Scotus attempted to reconcile the Neoplatonist doctrine of emanation with the Christian tenet of creation. Though highly influential upon his successors, notably the Western mystics and the thirteenth century Scholastics, De divisione naturae eventually suffered condemnation by the church because of its pantheistic implications. Striking similarities have been recognized between his speculations and those of Kabbalistic writings, such as the Sepher ha-‘iyyun, or “Book of Speculation.”[37]

Glastonbury

Henry of Blois sponsored hundreds of constructions including bridges, canals, palaces, forts, castles, and whole villages. In addition, Bishop Henry built dozens of abbeys and chapels and sponsored books including the treasured Winchester Bible. For hundreds of years, a round wooden tabletop has been hanging in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle. It is painted with the names of King Arthur and 24 knights around the table. The paint work was a later addition by order of Henry VIII of England for Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s 1522 state visit, and depicts Henry himself sitting in Arthur’s seat above a Tudor rose. In the fifteenth century, the English writer Thomas Malory created the image of Camelot most familiar today in his Le Morte d'Arthur, a work based mostly on the French romances. He firmly identifies Camelot with Winchester, an identification that remained popular for centuries.

From at least the twelfth century, the Glastonbury area has been associated with the legend of King Arthur, a connection promoted by medieval monks who asserted that Glastonbury was Avalon. The name of the mystical isle of Avalon first appears in Monmouth’s Historia as the place where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged and later where Arthur was taken to recover from his wounds after the Battle of Camlann. It is traditionally identified as the former island of Glastonbury Tor, a hill near Glastonbury. The Tor is mentioned in Celtic mythology, particularly in myths linked to King Arthur, and has a number of other enduring mythological and spiritual associations. The Tor seems to have been called Ynys yr Afalon (“The Isle of Avalon”) by the Britons and is believed by some.[38] At the end of twelfth century, Gerald of Wales wrote: “What is now known as Glastonbury was, in ancient times, called the Isle of Avalon. It is virtually an island, for it is completely surrounded by marshlands.”[39] The slopes of the hill are terraced, but the method by which they were formed remains unexplained.[40] The low-lying damp ground can produce a visual effect known as a Fata Morgana when the Tor appears to rise out of the mist. The Italian term Fata Morgana is derived from the name of Morgan le Fay, a powerful sorceress in Arthurian legend.[41]

According to William Kibler, Henry of Blois “had important contacts with Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Malmesbury.”[42] Henry of Blois sponsored several De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae (“On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury,” c. 1125) by a close personal friend William of Malmesbury. Malmesbury said he based it on “the writing of the ancients,” found in the Glastonbury library before it was destroyed. Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastoniensis writes of a belief that the Old Church was built by disciples of Jesus. While he does not name them, an edition of his work with interpolations and dating from around 1247, does claim that these disciples were led by Joseph of Arimathea. Arriving around 63, they built the church and lived out their days there.

Pierre Le Gentil argues that the mention of Avalon shows that de Boron wrote Joseph d’Arimathe after 1191, when the monks at Glastonbury claimed to have discovered the coffins of King Arthur and Guinevere.[43] Malmesbury’s history of the English kings stated “Arthur’s grave is nowhere seen, whence antiquity of fables still claims that he will return.”[44] However, Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate states that King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, which he identifies with Avalon. According to Gerald of Wales in his De principis instructione (“Instruction of a Prince, c. 1193) and recollected in his Speculum Ecclesiae (c. 1216),[45] just after King Henry II’s reign, the abbot of Glastonbury, Henry de Sully, commissioned a search which discovered a massive hollowed oak trunk buried underground containing the two skeletons of Arthur and his wife Guinevere. Above it, under the covering stone, was a leaden cross supposedly inscribed with Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia (“Here lies interred the famous King Arthur on the Isle of Avalon”). In 1278, the remains were reburied with great ceremony, attended by King Edward I and his queen, before the High Altar at Glastonbury Abbey.

According to Gerald of Wales, the digging for the tomb was prompted by the intelligence obtained by Henry II from an aged Welsh bard. Gerald was a close friend of the Welsh poet Walter Map (1140 – c. 1210). Map’s only surviving work, De Nugis Curialium (“Trifles of Courtiers”) is a collection of anecdotes and trivia, containing court gossip and a little real history, and written in a satirical vein. Along with William of Newburgh, he recorded the earliest stories of English vampires. Map was also associated with the Lancelot-Grail, also known as the Vulgate Cycle, a major source of Arthurian legend by authors unknown in the early thirteenth century, centered around the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and the quest for the Holy Grail, telling of the lives of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. The self-attribution to the Welsh Latin author Gautier (Walter) Map, is found in notes and even illustrations in some manuscripts describing his supposed discovery of an archive of documents at Salisbury and then being ordered to translate them from Latin to French by King Henry II.

Melusina

Walter Map was also responsible for the development of the legend of Melusine, or Melusina, a feminine spirit of European folklore, usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down, much like a mermaid. She is popularly known from her depiction of the logo of Starbucks. Melusina is the supposed ancestress of the famous House of Lusignan, who originated in Poitou, near Lusignan in western France, in the early tenth century. By the end of the eleventh century, the family had risen to become the most prominent petty lords in the region from their castle at Lusignan. At various times, the House of Lusignan ruled several principalities in Europe and the Holy Land, including the kingdoms of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Armenia. It also had great influence in England and France.

Poitiers, the ancient capital of the province of Poitou, was also the location of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court. In fact, some critics maintain that Eleanor was the inspiration for Melusine of Jean d’Arras.[46] The various elements of the Melusina legend were reconstructed by Map in the twelfth century in his De nugis curialium; in the thirteenth century in Gervais de Tilbury’s Otia imperialia dedicated to Otto IV; and Jean d’Arras novel, La Noble Histoire de Lusignan (“The Noble History of the Lusignans”), which he presented in 1393 to Jean de Berry, brother of King Charles V of France. Jean d’Arras wrote at the request of Jean de Berry, as he says in his introduction, a long prose romance called the Roman de Mélusine or the Chronique de Melusine part of Le Noble Hystoire de Lusignan, in 1392-94. Jean d’Arras dedicated the work to Jean de Berry’s sister Marie of Valois, Duchess of Bar (1344 – 1404) and expressed the hope that it would aid in the political education of her children.

Jean de Berry was Count of Poitiers, the ancient capital of the province of Poitou. The county was created by Charlemagne, who in 778 sent a certain Abbon to administer the territory. Under the Carolingian period, two Frankish families contested the title, that of the Guilhelmids, who were defeated by the Ramnulfides in 902. The new dynasty became the famous house of Poitiers, of which Eleanor of Aquitaine was the ultimate heir. Jean de Berry is often seen as the first great Western art collector, and was also described by some historians as a homosexual.[47] John de Berry was also a notable patron who commissioned among other works the most famous Book of Hours, the Très Riches Heures, is known to have been created for him because it has an inscription by Jean Flamel, often said to have been the brother of alchemist Nicolas Flamel.[48]

Also illustrated in the work is the castle of the famous Lusignan family of Poitou, a favorite residence for Jean until his death in 1416, with the dragon Melusine flying overhead. The House of Luxembourg, the House of Anjou and their descendants the House of Plantagenet and the French House of Lusignan are descended, according to medieval folk legends, from the dragon spirit Melusine. The legend of Melusina begins in Albany in Scotland, which the chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffroy of Monmouth attributes its foundation to the legendary Albanactus, son of Brutus of Brittany, a descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas. According to the legend, King Elinas of Albany, hunted in the forest and met a beautiful young fairy named Persine (Persian) by a fountain. At his wish to take her as his wife, she accepted, asking him to swear never to try to look upon her during her sleep. Persine married Elinas and they had three daughters, all as beautiful as their mother. The eldest was called Melusine, the second Melior and the last Palestine. Mataquas, son of Elinas’ by another marriage, jealous of his step-mother’s happiness, pushed his father into the room where Persine bathed her daughters. Persine went into exile with her three daughters to the south, on the magical island of Avalon.

In resentment for their misery, Melusine urged her sisters to lock their father in the mysterious Northumberland mountain, called Brumblerio, from where he would never leave again. Their mother was very angry and condemned the daughters to various fates. Melior was sentenced to keep a marvelous hawk in a castle in Armenia. Palestine was locked up with a leprechaun in Mount Canigou and had to keep her father’s treasure until a brave knight delivered her. Melusine would become a snake from the waist down every Saturday. Bettina Knapp, among others, suggest that Melusine’s transformations on Saturdays evokes the Sabbat of the witch, as well as the Jewish Sabbath. Knapp links Melusine’s bath to the mikveh, an ancient Jewish monthly cleansing ritual for women.[49] Vincensini, in his in-depth exploration of the significance of Saturday to her story, believes it be associated with the planet Saturn.[50]

If, according to her mother’s curse, Melusina found a man to marry her, provided that he never saw her on Saturday, she would give birth to a very noble and great lineage that would accomplish great feats. But if she ever separated from her husband, she would return, endlessly, to the torment of before. One day, Raymond of Lusignan, nephew of Aymar, Count of Poitiers, and son of the Count of Forez, came across Melusine in the woods. He had just killed his uncle in a hunting accident and was distraught. Melusine helped him and he later returned to seek her. He proposed marriage, and she agreed on the condition that he should never attempt to intrude upon her privacy every Saturday. By her magical powers, Melusine was to have built in a single night the Château de Lusignan, the largest castle in France. But when Raymond betrayed his promise. “O husband!” she said, “I leave two little ones in their cradle; look tenderly after them, bereaved of their mother. And now farewell for ever! yet know that thou, and those who succeed thee, shall see me hover over this fair castle of Lusignan, whenever a new lord is to come.” She transformed herself into a dragon, and departed with a scream and was never seen again.

Knight of the Swan

Another story of fairy ancestry is that of the Knight of the Swan, to explain the ancestries of the Houses of Bullion, Cleves, Oldenburg and Hesse. The story of the Knight of the Swan is connected to a well-known Medieval folk-tale known as the Swan-Children. The story of the swan children is recounted by Johannes de Alta Silva, a Cistercian monk of the twelfth century, in his version of the story of the Seven Wise Masters in Latin prose, entitled De rege et septem sapientibus (“On the King and the Seven Sages”), but better known by the title it was later given, Dolopathos. According to the tale, which was adapted into the French Li romans de Dolopathos by the poet Herber, a young lord becomes lost in the hunt for a white stag and wanders into an enchanted forest where he falls instantly in love with a mysterious woman in the act of bathing. The young lord brings her to his castle, where she gives birth to a septuplet, six boys and a girl, with golden chains about their necks. But her evil mother-in-law had them transformed into swans. The seven children are eventually changed back into human form, except one, who becomes the swan in the Swan Knight tale.[51]

The earliest versions preserved in Dolopathos do not provide specific identity to this knight, but the Old French Crusade cycle of chansons de geste adapted it to make the Swan Knight (“Le Chevalier au Cigne”), first produced around 1192, the legendary ancestor of Godfrey of Bouillon. The first episode, the Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, survives in two forms: of Elioxe who has children with King Lothair, and Beatrix who married King Orient. In both accounts, they have seven children, who are all turned into swans. All but one is able to transform back into human form, and leads the boat of one of his brothers, known as the Swan Knight. The Swan Knight comes to the defense of the dispossessed Duchess of Bouillon, whose land has been seized by Regnier of Saxony, whom he challenges to a duel. The Swan Knight defeats Regnier and wins the Duchess’ daughter in marriage. The Swan Knight, however, must leave Bouillon when his wife asks his true identity. After leaving Bouillon, his name is revealed to be Elias, and his brother, the swan who led his boat, finally regains his human form.

Ida, the daughter of the Knight Swan, became the mother of Eustace III of Boulogne, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Eustace III married Mary of Scotland was the sister of King David of Scotland, and the daughter of Malcolm III and Saint Margaret, daughter of Agatha of Bulgaria. Matilda and Stephen founded Faversham Abbey in 1148, whose library held a copy of the Liber Rubeus de Scaccario, which pronounced their Swan Knight lineage.[52] The ancestry of the Knight Swan survived through their daughter Matilda I, Countess of Boulogne, who married Stephen, King of England, brother of Henry of Blois.

By approximately 1170 AD, William of Tyre, the influential chronicler of the Crusades, could write that the legend linking Godfrey with the Swan Knight was widely accepted: “I purposely omit the story of the swan whence, legend declares, these brothers derived their origin, because, although many writers give that as true, yet it seems to be without foundation.”[53] Others, such as Geoffrey of Clairvaux (1187–8) and Hélinand of Froidmont (1211–23), also report the story. The fictitious histories of the First Crusade in the Old French Crusade Cycle also mention the Swan Knight as Godfrey’s ancestor. According to the Chanson d’Antioche (c.1180s): “His ancestor was brought by a swan to the sandy riverbanks at Nijmegen. […] A daughter was left behind in the castle of Bouillon; and Duke Godfrey is descended from her.”[54] The next sequence in the Crusade Cycle, La Chanson de Jérusalem, identifies Godfrey as the grandson of the Swan Knight. The Old French Crusade Cycle confirms the link between Godfrey and the Swan Knight through La Naissance, Le Chevalier au Cygne, La Fin d’Elias, Les Enfances Godefroi, and Le Retour de Cornumarant.[55]

The German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1160/80 – c. 1220), a knight of Bavarian origin, incorporated the swan knight Loherangrin into his Arthurian epic Parzival in the thirteenth century, believing the version of the Grail story by Chretien de Troyes (fl. c. 1160 – 1191), was wrong and less accurate than his own. Chretien de Troyes is known for first writing of Lancelot, Percival and the Holy Grail. Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, tells of Perceval’s visit to the Grail castle, where he sees a Graal borne in by a damsel. Its accompaniments are a bleeding lance and a silver plate. It is a precious vessel set with jewels, and so resplendent as to eclipse the lights of the hall. All the assembled knights show it reverence. Mindful of an injunction not to inquire too much, Perceval does not ask concerning the significance of what he sees, and thereby incurs guilt and reproach. Though Chretien’s poem was left unfinished, it was continued by four different authors who gave different endings to it.

Wolfram’s Parzival, written between 1200 and 1210, was the most celebrated romance of the time. Wolfram also wrote Willehalm, an unfinished poem about the military feats of Guillaume of Gellone against the Muslims. Wolfram claimed to have obtained his information from a certain Kyot de Provence, who would have been Guyot de Provins (d. after 1208), a troubadour and monk at Cluny. According to Wolfram, Kyot had uncovered a neglected Arabic manuscript in Moorish Toledo, Spain. Wolfram maintains that Kyot, in turn, supposedly received the Grail story from Flegetanis, a Muslim astronomer and a descendant of Solomon who had found the secrets of the Holy Grail written in the stars. According to Wolfram:

A heathen Flegetanis, had achieved high renown for his learning. This scholar of nature was descended from Solomon and born of a family which had long been Israelite until baptism became our shield against the fire of Hell. He wrote the adventure of the Grail. On his father’s side, Flegetanis was a heathen, who worshipped a calf…

The heathen Flegetanis could tell us how all the stars set and rise again… To the circling course of the stars man’s affairs and destiny are linked. Flegetanis the heathen saw with his own eyes in the constellations things he was shy to talk about, hidden mysteries. He said there was a thing called the Grail, whose name he had read clearly in the constellations. A host of angels left it on the earth.

Since then, baptized men have had the task of guarding it, and with such chaste discipline that those who are called to the service of the Grail are always noble men. Thus wrote Flegetanis of these things.[56]

According to Wolfram, after learning Arabic to read Flegetanis’ document, Kyot traveled throughout Europe to learn more about the Grail and the brotherhood that protected it. He finally came to Anjou, where he found the history of Percival’s family and wrote the tale which would later be retold by Wolfram. At Toledo, where Kyot is said to have learned about the Grail, was the famous Toledo School of Transators, where numerous works on astrology were being translated Jewish Kabbalists, including the Picatrix. There were other schools at Girona, Montpellier and elsewhere in the south of France. As well, there was also such a school at Troyes, which dated from 1070, and was conducted by Rashi.

There may also be an alchemical connection involved in the object of the Grail itself. To Wolfram, the Grail is an emerald fallen from Lucifer’s crown when he was cast out of Heaven. The emerald is the sacred stone of the planet Venus, whose other name is Lucifer. Wolfram’s version of the story appears to borrow from a Persian legend regarding Lucifer’s struggle in Heaven. His source may have been the Arabic manuscript he cites in attributing the ideas contained in his book. The legends suggest that when God decided to expel Lucifer, the angels were forced to take sides and chose either God or the devil. But there were a few neutral angels, who refused to fall in with either camp. And when Lucifer lost his emerald, they were the ones who brought the stone to earth where it served as an emblem of the struggle to find the middle way in this life, to locate the middle ground between good and evil.[57]

Wolfram may also be making reference to the famous alchemical work, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, introduced to Europe by the Arabs. Reliance on a writer who was quite possibly involved in alchemy would explain why he envisioned the grail not as a cup but as “a stone of the purest kind,” which sounds suspiciously like a reference to the philosopher’s stone. In fact, Wolfram claimed for the grail powers similar to those that the alchemists attributed to the philosopher’s stone. Both allegedly gave to their possessors spiritual perfection, union with God, and release from the fear of death. “Such power does the stone give a man that flesh and bones are at once made young again,” Wolfram wrote in Parzival.[58]

Wolfram, referring to the Templars, also claims Kyot’s research had revealed a genealogical connection between the account of the Grail: “And the sons of baptized men hold It and guard It with humble heart, and the best of mankind shall those knights be who have in such service part.”[59] According to Wolfram, the Grail sustained the lives of a brotherhood of knights called Templeisen, who are guardians of the Temple of the Grail. Like their real-life counterparts, who made their home in a palace near the site of Solomon’s Temple, the Templeisen were headquartered in a castle. This fictional castle was called Munsalvaesche, or “Mountain of Salvation,” a name which recalls Montsegur, the mountain fortress of the Cathars in Languedoc.[60]

In Wolfram’s Parzival, the story of the Knight Swan is attached to Loherangrin, the son of the Parzival and the queen of Pelapeire Condwiramurs. One day, in his castle Munsalvaesche, he hears a bell toll as a signal to come to the aid of a damsel in distress. As in other versions, Loherangrin is a knight who arrives in a swan-pulled boat to defend a lady, in this case Elsa of Brabant. They marry, but he must leave when she breaks the promise of not asking his name. In the late thirteenth century, the poet Nouhusius adapted and expanded Wolfram’s story into the romance Lohengrin. Probably the work through which the Swan Knight story is best known today through Wagner, who adapted the tale into his popular opera Lohengrin in 1848.

Skull of Sidon

Some scholars theorize that the tale of Melusine was of Scythian origin, having been brought to the West by returning Crusaders, and that Melusine is to be identified with one of the daughters of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, cousin Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who approved the founding the Templars.[61] Baldwin II married Morphia of the Rubenid dynasty of Armenian Cilicia, the original birthplace of the Mithraic cult. The Rubenids were also descended from the Bagratuni. Baldwin and Morphia’s daughter was Melusinde, which links her to the Melusina legend. Baldwin and Morphia had four daughters: Melisende who married Fulk V, Count of Anjou, becoming the step-brother of Geoffrey V of Anjou; Alice who married Bohemond II, Prince of Antioch; Hodierna who married Raymond II, Count of Tripoli; and Ioveta.[62]

The marriage of Baldwin and Morphia is connected to the necrophilic story of the “Skull of Sidon,” which also originated with Walter Map. Although Map’s version does not connect the Templars, when the order came under widespread accusations of heresy, the story was widely connected with the purported head that they worshipped, known as the Baphomet.[63] According to the most version of the story, a Templar “Lord of Sidon” was in love with a “great lady of Maraclea [Marash in Cilician Armenia].” When the knight’s wife died suddenly, on the night of her burial he crept to her grave, dug up her body and violated it. Then a voice from beyond ordered him to return nine months later, when he would find a son. He returned at the appointed time, opened the grave again, and found a skull and crossbones. The same voice then apparently commanded him to “guard it well, for it would be the giver of all good things,” and so he carried it away with him. It became his protecting genius, and he was able to defeat his enemies by merely showing them the magic head. In due course, it passed to the possession of the Templars.[64]

Genealogy of the Skull of Sidon Legend

• Fulk of Jerusalem + Erembourg, Countess of Maine

  • Geoffrey V of Anjou (founder of the Plantagenet dynasty) + Empress Matilda (daughter of Henry I of England + Matilda of Scotland, daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and Saint Margaret, daughter of Edward the Exile and Agatha of Bulgaria)

    • Henry II of England + Eleanor of Aquitaine

• Fulk of Jerusalem + Melisende (daughter of Baldwin II of Jerusalem + Morphia of Armenia)

  • Baldwin III of Jerusalem

  • Amalric I of Jerusalem + Agnes of Courtenay

    • Baldwin IV

    • Sibylla + Guy of Lusignan

  • Amalric I of Jerusalem + Maria Comnena

    • Isabella I + Henry II of Champagne (son of Count Henry I of Champagne and Marie de France, d. of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and patron of Grail author Chretien de Troyes)

    • Isabella I + Aimery of Lusignan (b. of Guy of Lusignan)

      • Sybille + King Leo I of Armenia

      • Mélisende + Bohemund IV of Antioch

Through his marriage to Melusinde Fulk V became King of Jerusalem in 1131 on the death of Melisende’s father Baldwin II. Fulk V had joined the crusade in 1120, and became a close friend of the Templars. After his return he began to subsidize the order, and maintained two knights in the Holy Land for a year. The son of Fulk V and Melusinde was Amalric I King of Jerusalem, whose first wife was Agnes de Courtenay. Their daughter Sibylla married Guy de Lusignan (c. 1150 – 1194), who was King of Jerusalem from 1186 to 1192 by right of marriage to Sibylla, and King of Cyprus from 1192 to 1194. Guy de Lusignan’s term as king is generally seen as disastrous. He was defeated by Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, and was imprisoned in Damascus as Saladin reconquered almost the entire Crusader kingdom. Richard the Lionheart then sold Guy the island of Cyprus, which he had conquered on his way to Acre. Guy thereby became the first Latin lord of Cyprus. Guy’s brother Aimery (before 1155 – 1205) succeeded him in Cyprus, and also became King of Jerusalem in 1197. Aimery married Isabella I of Jerusalem, the daughter of Amalric I from his second wife, Maria Komnene, the daughter of John Doukas Komnenos, a grandson of Byzantine Emperor John II Komnenos. Isabella I had been previously married to Henry II of Champagne, the son of Henry I of Champagne and Marie of France, daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a patron of Grail author Chretien de Troyes. Aimery and Isabella’s daughter Sybille married Leo II, the son of Stephen I of Armenia. Their union began a series of reciprocal marriages as a result of which the succession of Lesser Armenia actually passes to the Lusignan, which lasted until 1375 AD, when the Mamelukes of Egypt destroyed it.

[1] Pliny. Natural History, p. 63

[2] Hank Harrison. The Cauldron and the Grail (Media Associates, 1993), p. 223.

[3] Marjorie Chibnall. The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (London, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 178–180.

[4] Ibid., pp. 180–181

[5] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 31.

[6] Edward Donald Kennedy. “Visions of History: Robert de Boron and English Arthurian Chronicles" in, Norris J. Lacy, editor, The Fortunes of King Arthur. (D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2005), p. 39.

[7] Siân Echard. Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 122.

[8] Francis Pryor. Britain AD: A Quest for England, Arthur, and the Anglo-Saxons (London: HarperCollins, 2004).

[9] Francis Lot. The Island of Avalon: Volume 1. Lulu.com. pp. 420

[10] Marcus Jastrow & Max L. Margolis. “Ashkenaz.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[11] Robert Vermaat. The Draco, the Late Roman military standard, Retrieved from http://www.fectio.org.uk/articles/draco.htm; Keith Blayney[; King Arthur, the Red Dragon and improbable Blayney links. [http://www.keithblayney.com/Blayney/KingArthur.html

[12] Anthony Adolph. Brutus of Troy: And the Quest for the Ancestry of the British (Pen and Sword, 2015).

[13] Ibid.

[14] Tony McMahon. “Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – sacred to the Templars!.” The Templar Knight (March 29, 2012). Retrieved from https://thetemplarknight.com/2012/03/29/holy-sepulchre-knights-templar/

[15] Sadja Herzog. “Gossart, Italy, and the National Gallery's Saint Jerome Penitent.” Report and Studies in the History of Art, vol. 3, 1969, pp, 68.

[16] Ibid.

[17] John 19: 41-42.

[18] Paul Stephenson. Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor (The Overlook Press, 2010), p. 206.

[19] G. Frederick Owen, ed. The Thompson Chain-Reference Bible (Fourth improved (updated) ed.) (Indianapolis: B.B. Kirkbride Bible Co., 1964), p. 323.

[20] Cited in J.W. Drijvers. Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Brill, 1992), p. 169.

[21] M. Gwyn Morgan. “Catullus and the ‘Annales Volusi.’” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, New Series, Vol. 4 (1980), pp. 59-67.

[22] “The saint who married a Muslim princess.” Catholic Herald (January 4, 2008). Retrieved from http://archive-uat.catholicherald.co.uk/article/4th-january-2008/8/the-saint-who-married-a-muslim-princess

[23] Napier. A to Z of the Knights Templar, p. 290.

[24] Caesar. The Conquest of Gaul, vi. 14.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Rolleston. Celtic Myths and Legends, p. 85.

[27] Roman History, XV, 9, 8.

[28] Refutation of All Heresies, Book I, chap. XXII.

[29] Strabo. Geographica, IV 4c. 198,5.

[30] T.W. Rolleston. Celtic Myths and Legends (New York: Dover Publications, 1917), p. 85.

[31] Ibid, p. 83

[32] Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. The Messianic Legacy, p. 155

[33] Ibid., p. 153.

[34] Ibid., p. 152.

[35] Ibid., p. 158.

[36] Geoffrey Ashe. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury (Glasgow, England: Fontana/Collins, 1990), p. 125.

[37] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 48.

[38] “Gerald of Wales.” Sources of British History. Britannia. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20131003182610/http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/debarri.htm

[39] “Two Accounts of the Exhumation of Arthur’s Body: Gerald of Wales.” britannia.com.

[40] Historic England. “Earthworks Glastonbury Tor (196702).” PastScape. Retrieved from http://www.pastscape.org.uk/hob.aspx?hob_id=196702

[41] “Morgan le Fay.” Camelot Project. University of Rochester. Retrieved from http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/theme/morgan

[42] William W. Kibler. Arthurian Romances, by Chretien de Troyes (New York: Penguin, 1991), 6.

[43] Pierre Le Gentil. “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval,” Chapter 19, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, A Collaborative History, ed. R.S. Loomis. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

[44] William of Malmesbury. De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiæ (in Latin).

[45] White 1997, pp. 517–523; John William Sutton. “The Tomb of King Arthur.” University of Rochester. In his Liber de Principis instructione (“Book of the instruction of princes"), of circa 1193, and his Speculum Ecclesiae ("Mirror of the Church”), of circa 1216. He identified the abbot in charge as “Abbot Henry, who was later elected Bishop of Worcester.”

[46] Bettina L. Knapp. French Fairy Tales: A Jungian Approach (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 24.

[47] Michael Camille. “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry.” Art History. Volume24, Issue2, April 2001.

[48] Nigel Wilkins. Nicolas Flamel. (Des livres et de l'or, Imago, 1993).

[49] Bettina L. Knapp. French Fairy Tales: A Jungian Approach (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 50.

[50] Jean-Jacques Vincensini. “Introduction.” In Mélusine ou La Noble Histoire de Lusignan. Jean d’Arras, ed. Jean-Jaques Vincensini (Paris: Lettres gothiques, 2003), p. 100.

[51] Emanuel J. Mickel & Jan A. Nelson, eds. La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne. The Old French Crusade Cycle. 1. Geoffrey M. Myers (essay). (University of Alabama Press, 1977).

[52] Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).

[53] William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Turnholt: Brepols, 1986), IX, vi (p. 427); William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, tr. Emily Atwater Babcock and A. C. Krey, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), IX.6 (p.388); cited in Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).

[54] La Chanson d’Antioche, ed. Suzanne Duparc-Quioc, 2 vols (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1977), ll. 7453, 7472–3 (pp. 372–3); cited in Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).

[55] Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).

[56] Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, p. 293

[57] Mystic Quests, p. 117.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Gardner. Bloodline of the Holy Grail, p. 137

[60] Edward Peters, ed (1980). “The Cathars.” Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press). p. 108.

[61] Jean Marchant. La Légende de Mélusine. Jean d’Arras (Paris: Boivin, 1927), p. vii.

[62] John L. La Monte. “The Lords of Le Puiset on the Crusades,” Speculum, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan., 1942), pp. 100-101; William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey, trans. (Columbia University Press, 1943).

[63] Malcolm Barber. The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006 p. 211.

[64] J. S. M. Ward. Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods, 2nd ed (London, 1926), p. 305.

Volume One

Introduction

1. Babylon

2. Ancient Greece

3. The Hellenistic Age

4. The Book of Revelation

5. Gog and Magog

6. Eastern Mystics

7. Septimania

8. Princes' Crusade

9. The Reconquista

10. Ashkenazi Hasidim

11. The Holy Grail

12. Camelot

13. Perceval

14. The Champagne Fairs

15. Baphomet

16. The Order of Santiago

17. War of the Roses

18. The Age of Discovery

19. Renaissance & Reformation

20. Kings of Jerusalem

21. The Mason Word

22. The Order of the Dragon