I have already drawn attention to the fact that in Gawain and the Green Knight the hero’s badge is the Pentangle (or Pentacle), there explained as called by the English ’the Endless Knot.’[29] In the previous chapter I have noted that the Pentangle frequently in the Tarot suits replaces the Dish; in Mr Yeats’s remarks, cited above, the two are held to be interchangeable, one or the other always forms one of the group of symbols.

In one form of the Morris Dance, that performed in Berkshire, the leader, or ‘Squire’ of the Morris carries a Chalice!  At the same time he bears a Sword, and a bull’s head at the end of a long pole.  This figure is illustrated in Miss Mary Neal’s Esperance Morris Book.[30]

Thus our English survivals of these early Vegetation ceremonies preserve, in a more or less detached form, the four symbols discussed in the preceding chapter, Grail, Sword, Lance, and Pentangle, or Dish.  It seems to me that, in view of the evidence thus offered, it is not a very hazardous, or far-fetched hypothesis to suggest that these symbols, the exact value of which, as a group, we cannot clearly determine, but of which we know the two most prominent, Cup and Lance, to be sex symbols, were originally ‘Fertility’ emblems, and as such employed in a ritual designed to promote, or restore, the activity of the reproductive energies of Nature.

As I have pointed out above an obvious dislocation has taken place in our English survivals.  Sword Dance, Mumming Play, and Morris Dance, no longer form part of one ceremony, but have become separated, and connected, on the one hand with the Winter, on the other with the early Summer, Nature celebrations; it is thus not surprising that the symbols should also have become detached.  The fact that the three groups manifestly form part of an original whole is an argument in favour of the view that at one moment all the symbols were used together, and the Grail chalice carried in a ceremony in which Sword, Lance, and Pentangle, were also displayed.

But there is another point I would suggest.  Is it not possible that, in these armed youths, who were in some cases, notably in that of the Salii, at once warriors and priests, we have the real origin of the Grail Knights?  We know now, absolutely, and indubitably, that these Sword Dances formed an important part of the Vegetation ritual; is it not easily within the bounds of possibility that, as the general ceremonial became elevated, first to the rank of a Mystery Cult, and then used as a vehicle for symbolic Christian teaching, the figures of the attendant warrior-priests underwent a corresponding change?  From Salii to Templars is not after all so ‘far a cry’ as from the glittering golden-armed Maruts, and the youthful leaping Kouretes, to the grotesque tatterdemalion personages of the Christmas Mumming Play.  We have learnt to acknowledge the common origin of these two latter groups; may we not reasonably contemplate a possible relation existing between the two first named?