The adventure of the Perilous Chapel in Grail romances.  Gawain form.  Perceval versions.  Queste.  Perlesvaus.  Lancelot.  Chevalier à Deux Espées.  Perilous Cemetery.  Earliest reference in Chattel Orguellous. Âtre Perilleus.  Prose Lancelot.  Adventure part of ‘Secret of the Grail.’  The Chapel of Saint Austin.  Histoire de Fulk Fitz-Warin.  Genuine record of an initiation.  Probable locality North Britain.  Site of remains of Mithra-Attis cults.  Traces of Mystery tradition in Medieval romance.  Owain Miles.  Bousset, Himmelfahrt der Seele.  Parallels with romance.  Appeal to Celtic scholars.  Otherworld journeys a possible survival of Mystery tradition.  The Templars, were they Naassenes?

CHAPTER XIV

The Author

Provenance and authorship of Grail romantic tradition.  Evidence points to Wales, probably Pembrokeshire.  Earliest form contained in group of Gawain poems assigned to Bleheris.  Of Welsh origin.  Master Blihis, Blihos, Bliheris, Bréri, Bledhericus.  Probably all references to same person.  Conditions of identity.  Mr E. Owen, and Bledri ap Cadivor.  Evidence not complete but fulfils conditions of problem Professor Singer and possible character of Bleheris’ text.  Mr Alfred Nutt.  Irish and Welsh parallels.  Recapitulation of evolutionary process.  Summary and conclusion.

“Animus ad amplitudinem Mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur, non Mysteria ad angustias animi constringantur.” (Bacon.)

“Many literary critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists.—­But the true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shewn to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlaates, and explains.”  (Cornford, Origins of Attic Comedy.)

CHAPTER I

Introductory

In view of the extensive literature to which the Grail legend has already given birth it may seem that the addition of another volume to the already existing corpus calls for some words of apology and explanation.  When the student of the subject contemplates the countless essays and brochures, the volumes of studies and criticism, which have been devoted to this fascinating subject, the conflicting character of their aims, their hopelessly contradictory results, he, or she, may well hesitate before adding another element to such a veritable witches’ cauldron of apparently profitless study.  And indeed, were I not convinced that the theory advocated in the following pages contains in itself the element that will resolve these conflicting ingredients into one harmonious compound I should hardly feel justified in offering a further contribution to the subject.

But it is precisely because upwards of thirty years’ steady and persevering study of the Grail texts has brought me gradually and inevitably to certain very definite conclusions, has placed me in possession of evidence hitherto ignored, or unsuspected, that I venture to offer the result in these studies, trusting that they may be accepted as, what I believe them to be, a genuine Elucidation of the Grail problem.