Customer Reviews

The Holy Grail: The Legend, the History, the Evidence

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I've never studied much about the Holy Grail, though the occult is a long-standing interest of mine. I thought that this book might be a good place to start an exploration. It looked short and sweet, and the editorial review here was favorable. Boy, was I wrong! The facts that Griffin cites don't substantiate his conclusions, and he doesn't even attribute them. The book (or at least the first few chapters of it, I stopped reading midway in disgust) is full of lofty references to the breadth of research required for a study of the Grail. If Griffin did research, I didn't find any evidence of that. (Footnotes, man! Footnotes are your friends!) And also, even though my understanding of the history and legend surrounding the Grail is extremely limited, he didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know. Very disappointing.

I confess I'm obsessed with the Grail, the Knights Templar, Mary Magdalene, the Tarot. Blame that doggone DaVinci Code. This quest-no pun intended-led me to Griffin's book.

The good news is it's short and it does have some interesting historical asides (Jesus' blood would have been preserved by Joseph of Armimathea in the Grail because it was the Jewish burial tradition to bury spilt blood with the deceased.) The bad news is the book badly needs an editor. Information is repeated over and over, sometimes within paragraphs of each other. Griffin, while clearly passionate about his subject, is also clearly not a career writer-the cover says he's a network specialist. He's capable but his prose lacks a certain polish and elegance. He also has a slight Christian bias, occasionally not separating historical fact from mythology. For example, Griffin states that Joseph of Armimathea established the first Christian church at Glastonbury and carried with him 2 cruets of Christ's blood. I believe Joseph's founding of Glastonbury and in fact his presence in the British Isles is legend-supported by incidental historical details but nonetheless not fact. However Griffin presents it this way and uses this legend as a jumping off point for a whole line of reasoning. That and few other instances made me question the information and conclusions provided.

This book is a good supplement or jumping off point but should not be considered the alpha and omega of your own quest for the Grail legend. Good luck, fellows knights!

I suppose the best one can say about Griffin's The Holy Grail: The Legend, the History, the Evidence is that at least it provides an interested reader with a basic Grail vocabulary. And it's short. That's the good news. The bad news is that Griffin stretches remote possibility/hearsay-types of anecdotes and tries to represent them as facts. Lots of passive voice ("it has been determined that..." or "it is thought that..."), absolutely no direct source citation for his "facts." The bibliography at the back is no substitute for solid in-text source citation to substantiate every assertion! My conclusion: When you try to concretize a metaphor, all you end up with is nebulous, dubious, unsubstantiated speculation disguised as historical inquiry (for example, check out Griffin's "analysis" of Longinus's spear, or the "findings" of St. Helena in Jesus's tomb). Skip this book.

Finally, something fresh about the Holy Grail legend. It is obvious this book was written by someone who has made the study of Grail legends his life's mission. But he does not approach it with a theory already in mind, trying to find (or fit) the evidence to that theory. Having a preconceived notion filters our view. Griffin steps back, and starts, as it were, from scratch and instead of any preconceived notion, where he leads the facts, the evidenced, he decides to let the facts, the evidences, lead him. Read the book to the end, let Griffin give you another way of looking at the Grail legends. The search for the truth requires humility, requires that one question one's assumptions, and as the New Testament says, to test all things and keep that which is good.