9). Campbell further explains the reason for the obsession with the Grail in the Arthurian court as a new element of religious experience in the Western world inasmuch as it added a frankly humanistic component to the experience of spirituality:
For what reason, pray, should a Christian knight ride forth questing for the grail when at hand,in every chapel, were the blessed body and blood of Christ literally present in the sacrament of the alter for the redemption and beatitude of his soul?
The answer, obviously, is th at the Grail Quest was an individual adventure in experience. The backgrounds of the legend lay in pagan, specifically Celtic, myth. Its heroes were the old champions, Cuchullin and the rest, returned in knightly armor as Gawain, Percival, or Galahad, to engage, as ever, in marvelous adventure. The backgrounds of the legend lay in pagan, specifically Celtic, myth. Its heroes were the old champion Cuchullin and the rest, returned in knightly armor as Gawain, Percival, or Galahad, to engage, as ever, in marvelous adventure. There had been added, furthermore, through the influence of Islam, related symbols, loaded with the mystic lore of Asia; elements, also, from Byzantium and from even farther East. By various schools of modern scholarship the Grail has been identified with the Dagda's caldron of plenty, the begging bowl of the
Buddha in which four bowls, from the four quarters were united, the Kaaba of the Great Mosque of Mecca and the ultimate talismanic symbol of some sort of Gnostic - Manichaean rite of spiritual initiation, practiced possibly by the Knights Templar. All such alien, primitive, or related Oriental forms, however, were in the European romances reinterpreted and applied to the local, immediate spiritual situation. specifically, the legend refers to the restoration of a land laid waste through a Dolorous Stroke dealt to its king by an unworthy hand, which took ...