Sacred Feminine

How the Holy Grail Came to Symbolize Ego Death

Quick Summary

• How Secret Drugs BIRTHED The Legend of the Holy Grail

• Why Christianity Destroyed the FEMININE Trinity

• How the HOLY GRAIL Came to Represent a Lost Feminine Secret

How Secret Drugs BIRTHED The Legend of the Holy Grail

In the centuries before Christianity, the Eleusinian Mysteries were the central axis around which Greco-Roman spiritual life revolved. The Roman orator Cicero gushed: “Among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society, there is nothing better than the Mysteries.”

The Romans borrowed Greek philosophy, art techniques and even gods like Zeus—who enjoyed a second life as the Roman god Jupiter. That fact that Cicero singled out the Mysteries as the single greatest thing Rome ever received from Athens reveals their massive significance.

Eleusis is a small town just outside Athens, where the cult of the grain goddess Demeter held secretive annual ceremonies for over a thousand years. Anyone who was anyone in Greco-Roman society—from Plato to Julius Caesar—made their pilgrimage to Eleusis to drink from the mysterious Kykeon chalice.

The rites of Eleusis were celebrations of femininity. To drink from the chalice was to worship a trinity of goddesses. The virginal daughter Persephone, the motherly Demeter, and wise old Hecate symbolized the three phases of a woman’s life for Eleusinian priestesses, who passed down the mysterious recipe of the Kykeon over generations. Death-and-rebirth, or resurrection, was a major theme.

The recipe was a closely-guarded secret. Revealing it was punishable by exile—as with the Athenian statesman Alcibiades—or even death. Stiff punishments like these ensured that the contents of the Kykeon remained an enduring mystery for millennia.

But now in the 21st century, that mystery has finally been solved. Recent archaeobotanical evidence (Juan-Stresserras, J., & Matamala, J. C., 2005) has all but proven that ergot was the active ingredient in the Kykeon, which turns out to have been a beer-like substance.

Ergot is a psychoactive fungus that grows on cereal grains. Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann used this fungus to synthesize LSD for the first time back in 1938. High enough doses of ergot induce an experience called “ego death”, where the mental understanding of the self is chemically disabled—just as inhibitions can be chemically disabled by alcohol. The experience feels like a personal death-and-rebirth.

A mental conception of self is an invaluable tool for planning and survival. But a keen enough mental reflection of any physical body means awareness of that body’s mortality. That’s why humans are constantly tortured by the awful knowledge of our guaranteed deaths.

But pilgrims to the Eleusinian Mysterious claimed to have discovered the secret of immortality, or to have been “saved.” With a sip from the mystical Kykeon, they briefly freed themselves from the prison of ego. For the Greeks and Romans, immortality and salvation were feminine experiences that came from drinking out of a magical chalice. These are the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Damsel of the Sanct Grael (1874)

Why Christianity Destroyed the FEMININE Trinity

Humans are like actors who forget to change out of their costumes. The humdrum of our daily lives sucks us into the illusion of inhabiting bodies. But it is possible to break that illusion. The crashing realization that we’re much more than just narrow egos feels like a personal death-and-rebirth and was regarded by the ancients as feminine in character. The association came from the “costume-change” they saw in motherhood, when a single individual forks into multiple individuals.

The Greek and Romans portrayed their goddess Demeter as a mother because her cereal grains grow a psychoactive fungus that temporarily shatters the illusion of ego.

Likewise, Greco-Roman wine was frequently laced with hallucinogenic ingredients like henbane and Bacchus the wine god was effeminate. He had the distinctive long hair of a woman (faithfully captured by Caravaggio centuries later) and was sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitalia.

Early Christianity combined Demeter’s grain and Bacchus’ wine into the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The old death-and-rebirth motif was reanimated by the story of the Crucifixion, where the Holy Grail makes its debut. On the eve of his execution, Jesus invites his disciples to drink from a cup. Matthew quotes him saying, “Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”

Christ inherited many of the wine god’s traits. He sported the same long, feminine haircut. And because wine grapes were originally introduced to Greece from the Near East, Greco-Roman wine gods were said to come from that direction—just like Jesus, who hailed from Palestine. Furthermore, Bacchus and Jesus both transform water into wine.

Jesus’ mother also inherited much from a feminine trinity of goddesses worshipped across the Mediterranean Basin during pre-Christian times. Mary assumed the combined roles of both the motherly grain goddess Demeter and her virginal daughter Persephone. This curious combination of mother and virgin has been vexing theologians ever since.

Though the feminine trinity was highly significant in the ancient world, its third member was cast out by the early Church. With twin torches held aloft, the wise old crone Hecate was supposed to have led the grain goddess into the underworld in search of her kidnapped daughter. But Christianity rewarded her efforts by transforming Hecate into the terrifying archetype of the witch.

Apart from Mary, the early Church opposed goddess worship because it was protecting a fragile spiritual monopoly. Roman authorities had already co-opted the cult of the effeminate wine god Bacchus in 186 BC, citing the nefarious influence of the Cult’s high priestess.

During the twilight of the Empire, Christianity got the same treatment. The last emperors of Rome converted to Christianity and assumed control of it to generate solidarity in a crumbling society. They eventually banned all competing religious practices in a bid to shore up their waning political power.

When they failed and Rome fell, the Roman Catholic Church carried its bizarre relationship with femininity into the Middle Ages. Christianity retained the veneration of motherhood it had once borrowed from paganism and adopted similar magical sacraments. But it tolerated no competition from rival sacraments unsanctioned by the Church. Those who defied the Church’s spiritual monopoly were condemned as heretics or burned as witches. During the late Middle Ages, millions of women suffered agonizing public executions for the crime of witchcraft.

Caravaggio - Bacchus (1596)

How the HOLY GRAIL Came to Represent a Lost Feminine Secret

During the High Middle Ages, storytellers picked up on the mystical chalice used at the Last Supper and expanded it into the Holy Grail. They placed Joseph of Arimathea at the scene of the Crucifixion, catching the blood of Christ in the same cup His disciples had used the night before at the first Communion. Joseph then brings the Holy Grail to England, where the magic cup that grants immortality pops up in the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

The next great update to the Grail legend didn’t arrive until 2003, when Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code. He missed his chance to directly connect the Holy Grail to the mystical chalices used in Greco-Roman paganism. But Brown nevertheless wove his plot around the idea that the Holy Grail symbolizes the veneration of femininity.

In Brown’s book, the Grail is not a cup but the physical person of Jesus’ pregnant wife, Mary Magdalene. After the Crucifixion, her supporters smuggle her out of Palestine and into France, where their descendants faithfully keep Jesus’ secret bloodline hidden from jealous Church authorities.

The Da Vinci Code takes its title from the idea that one such descendant was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, and that the Mona Lisa uses a bizarre split horizon to symbolize an imbalance between femininity and masculinity. Dan Brown suggests that Da Vinci rendered Lisa androgynous–like the wine god Bacchus—to symbolize the restoration of a sacred union between male and female.

The Holy Grail itself is a Christianization of existing motifs surrounding salvation and immortality that swirled around the Mediterranean Basin in the centuries before Christ. The notion of achieving immortality or salvation by drinking from a mystical chalice matches themes common to pre-Christian cults like that of the motherly grain goddess Demeter.

In The Da Vinci Code, Lisa’s wry smile is a hint that her painting is an elaborate inside joke about the suppression of the sacred feminine. The joke is that Christianity is based on many of the same ancient traditions that it still violently persecuted back in Da Vinci’s day. The pagan history of the Holy Grail exposes the Church for having suppressed its own spiritual precursors.

Leonardo da Vinci - Mona Lisa (1506)

Conclusion

The moral of the story of the Crucifixion is that we are not our bodies, as we appear to ourselves to be. Christ was so confident that he was not actually his body that he volunteered it for gruesome public execution. Over the centuries, that story seeded another legend about the mystical cup that held His blood and which confers immortality. That chalice allegorizes the secret fact that the physical world is an illusion, and so is our identification with our physical bodies. During ancient times, this secret was realized pharmacologically with the ritual drinking of certain psychoactive substances capable of inducing the experience of ego death. Christianity evolved out of those traditions, adopted their symbols of death-and-rebirth as its own, but then outlawed its predecessors. Thereafter, whispers of a profound and magical secret took the form of the Holy Grail.

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Further Materials

Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today’s troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to “reeducate” the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific.
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches’ Hammer—indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.
The propaganda and bloodshed had worked. Today’s world was living proof.
Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice … woman.
Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church’s defamation. In France and Italy, the words for “left”—gauche and sinistra—came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity,and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003, Page 105