Where Is the Holy Grail?

This might be the most famous test in movie history. A knight who's been waiting in a room for 700 years. A table full of golden cups and somewhere in the middle of them, one plain little cup. The cup of a carpenter that grants eternal life to whoever drinks it. But you have to choose wisely. There's just one problem. The Holy Grail, which is what we're talking about evidently, and the reason you probably clicked on this video, it's not in the Bible. Go check. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. There's a cup on the table at the Last Supper. Jesus does lift it. He blesses it. He passes it around and then the story moves on and never mentions it again. It's no relic. There's no knights and there's certainly no quest for it. The most famous object in the Western world was invented by a poet in France in the 12th century. And he died before he ever finished a story. And that unfinished story got completely out of control. Eight centuries later, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany drove up a mountain in Spain in the middle of World War II to ask a monastery, to its face, where was it hiding the Grail? And get this, he wasn't even the first Nazi to go looking. The first one was already dead in the snow. So the part that no one really tells you right now is that there are four cups on earth at this moment that people seriously claim to be the real Holy Grail. One was carried by two popes, one was chewed to pieces by pilgrims, and one shut down an entire museum in a matter of days. And tonight, I'm gonna show you the one cup that really has a case. The right age, the right region, and a paper trail 600 years long. And it's definitely not the one you'd guess. It's certainly not in Petra in Jordan. But before we get into the actual legend itself, let's get clear on what we're hunting here. Because if you ask ten people what the Holy Grail is, you'll get ten different answers. And weirdly, all of them are kind of part of the legend. But the core version is this, the Grail is the cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, the first cup of the First Communion. And then, one day later, the same cup was used to catch his blood at the crucifixion. So it's a relic twice over. It touched the wine that became the blood, and then it touched the actual blood itself. And because of that, the legend says it's not a normal object anymore. Drink from it, and your wounds will heal. Any wound. Keep it near you, and you don't age. In the medieval stories, it goes even further. At the Grail Castle, the cup floats through the hall, and every night at the table, finds the food he loves best in front of him. It's a healing relic, a fountain of youth, and an endless feast all in one cup. But there's a catch, and the catch is the whole point. You can't just find the Grail. You have to deserve it. In story after story, mighty knights get within sight of it and fail. Because the Grail only reveals itself to the pure. It's the one treasure you cannot take. It has to accept you. That is why the Holy Grail became our word for the ultimate unreachable thing. The Holy Grail of physics. The Holy Grail of medicine. The legend is so strong, it's become grammar. Oh, and depending on which century you're reading it, the Grail is a cup, or a serving dish, or a stone that fell from heaven. Hold that thought, because it does matter later. Now, in the movie, in 1988, Spielberg shot his Grail Temple at a real place, Petra, Jordan. The canyon of the crescent moon is the seat, and the temple is Al-Qazneh, the treasury carved by the Nabataeans about 2,000 years ago. It was probably a royal tomb, and it worked so well that people show up expecting a chamber behind that facade. Me, myself, when I was a kid, I was like, this place is real? Why haven't we found the Grail yet? Come on guys, it's right there, we figured it out! Anyways, there is in one. It's a single room, about 40 feet deep, and it's empty. But the movie did get one thing exactly right, and most people don't think about this. The Grail Diary, Henry Jones Sr. spends his whole life chasing these clues from medieval texts, not scripture, because the medieval texts are the only place the Grail exists. Remember the problem from the top of the video? The Bible has a cup at the Last Supper, and it's never mentioned again. It doesn't offer any powers or benefits. There's no quest, there's no knights. So every single thing I just described, the blood, the healing, the eternal life, the test of worthiness, where did it all come from? A poet, working for hire, in the 12th century. His name was Chechen Datorius. He was the most popular writer in France. He basically built the King Arthur Reno. Lancelot, Camelot, Guinevere's Affair, he wrote most of that first. And around 1180, he started a new poem for his patron, accountant Flanders, and he called it Percival, or the Story of the Grail. Here's the scene. Percival, a young, kind of clueless knight, is having dinner with a wounded king. And a procession comes through the hall. First, a boy carrying a lance, and the lance is bleeding. A single drop of blood runs down from the tip. Then a girl walks past carrying a grail. Now, and this does matter, in French, a grail isn't a cup, it's a serving dish. A wide, shallow platter, the kind you'd bring like a fish out on. He says it's gold and set with jewels in it, and that's it. He doesn't call it holy, and he doesn't connect it to Jesus. And Percival, who's been told that polite knights don't ask too many questions, watches the whole thing go by. And he does not ask what this is, which, I mean, you're in a king's place. Normal, cool, jeweled plates, I guess. That's kind of normal, I would assume. But the silence is the whole engine of the legend. Because the poet built that scene so the reader is screaming, ask, ask what it is, and Percival doesn't. And the next morning, the castle is empty. And he finds out that if he'd just asked the question, the king would have been healed. Then the poet died. Mid-poem, he never finished it. He never explained what the growl was, what the bleeding lance meant, or why the king was wounded. Think about what that does. The most famous writer in Europe drops a tantalizing mystery everyone was reading, and then leaves a blank page. So other people started filling it in. And within 30 years, there were at least four different sequels by four different writers, each one adding their own answer. And one of them changed the world. It's almost as if George R. R. Martin dies before finishing the book, so it'll probably happen. And then four different authors wrote Winter Winter and Dream of Spring. And all of them took it in completely different directions. One of which became so culturally relevant, like the Night Watch, becoming used in everyday grammar, meaning something awful you had to go through or something like that. Like, that's insane. Any which way, around the year 1200, a writer named Robert de Boren sat down and decided the grail wasn't a dish. It was the cup from the Last Supper. And then he went further. He said that after the crucifixion, a man named Joseph of Arimathea, the rich guy who donates his tomb in the Gospels, took that same cup and used it to catch Christ's blood from the cross. That's the moment the grail becomes a relic, not a symbol. A physical object touched the blood of God. And Robert says Joseph's family carried it west, out of the Holy Land, and hid it. But where? He doesn't quite say. Later writers would say Britain, specifically in Glastonbury. There's actually a well there today called the Chalice Well, and the water runs red from iron. And the local legend, going back centuries, is that Joseph buried the cup beneath it. And that's why the spring runs the color of blood. There's no evidence for that, mind you, but you can go drink from it. Now, here's where it does get weirder, though, and where the movie's version quietly comes from. A German knight poet named Wolfram von Eschbach wrote his own version. Parasval, and in his telling, the grail isn't a cup at all. It's a stone that fell from heaven, and the people guarding it are an order of holy knights living in a hidden castle sworn to protect it. He calls them the Templesion, or the Templars. Does that sound familiar? A secret order of knights guarding the grail in a hidden fortress for centuries. That's the grail knight in the film. That's the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. Spielberg and Lucas didn't invent it, Wolfram did 800 years ago. And then in the 1400s, Thomas Malory put all of it into one book, and gave the grail quest to Galahad, the perfect knight, and made the grail so holy that when Galahad finally sees it, he asks to die. And he does. So by the time the printing press exists, the grail is fully built. A cup from the Last Supper that caught Christ's blood, carried west by Joseph of Arimathea, guarded by knights, and hidden. And none of it, not one piece, is older than 1180. Which brings us back to that black car climbing the mountain. But before we get to Heinrich Himmler, there was a man named Otto Rahn. Rahn was a young German writer obsessed with Wolfram's Parzival, and he had a theory. He believed the grail castle in the poem was real, and that it was Montserget, a fortress in the French Pyrenees, where a heretical Christian set called the Cathars made their last stand in 1244. He went there in 1931, and he explored the caves underneath the mountain. He wrote a book called The Crusade Against the Grail, arguing that the Cathars had been the true grail keepers, and the Catholic Church had wiped them all out to bury it. Then, the book landed on the desk of the exact wrong person, Heinrich Himmler. He read it, and... And one of the things that Indiana Jones, as a film franchise, gets right, is that the Nazis were not just running the SS and everything else they were doing, they had a research institute called the Annerbe. Now, the Annerbe, it means ancestral heritage, was on paper a scholarly organization with archaeologists, linguists, historians, but in reality, it existed to prove a fantasy, that Germans descended from a lost Aryan master race, and that the relics of that race were still scattered across the world, waiting to be found. Very Agartha-coded, in my opinion. And they actually went looking for a lot of this stuff. The Annerbe sent an expedition to Tibet, to measure skulls in the Himalayas, they sent teams to Scandinavia to catalogue rock carvings into caves, and dig sites across Europe and the Middle East. And a vast majority of the Indiana Jones stories start with the same idea. Nazi archaeologists, Belloq did it, Voss did it, and in this movie, Dr. Schneider is looking for the same thing. And people assume that it's Pulp Fiction, but it's not. It was a funded government department with letterhead. The difference is that in the movies, the Nazis are chasing something real, in reality, they were chasing their own mythology, and doing real evil along the way. After the war, the Annerbe's managing director was tried at the Nuremberg trial, and executed. Not for archaeology, though. But back in the 30s, this was the machine that read Otto Rahn's grail book, and the machine wanted him. He was recruited, put in uniform, and sent back out looking. Rahn didn't last. He was reportedly gay, first of all, Nazis weren't too big on that. He also had a Jewish ancestry, which the Germans were also not big fans of at the time. He had been assigned guard duty at Dachau, which, by his own letters, broke him. In March 1939, he walked into the mountains of Austria, and was found dead in the snow. Officially, it was exposure, but some people think worse. Himmler kept looking without him. Which is how, in October 1940, the black car from the beginning of the video, ended up at Montserrat, a monastery in the mountains outside of Barcelona. Himmler seems to have believed that Wolfram's grail castle, Montchavise, in the poem, was actually Montserrat. It's a similar word, basically meaning Mountain of Salvation. And one of the details I love about this, is that the abbot refused to come out and meet him. He sent one monk out instead, reportedly the only one who actually spoke German, to walk the head of the SS around like any other tourist. The monks didn't tell him that they have it, and the most feared man in Europe got back in his car, and drove back down the mountain empty-handed. Little fun detail, Last Crusade came out in 1989, Otto Rahn's story wasn't widely known in English till the 90s. So Spielberg and Lucas did not know that they were adapting a truist story, they just guessed that if the Nazis had hunted the Ark, they'd want the grail too. And they were right. Which brings us to the question the movie actually asks, if it's real, which cup is it? Candidate 1 is in Ganoa, Italy, the Sacro Catino. In 1101, crusaders from Ganoa sacked the city of Caesarea, and brought home a wide, six-sided dish that everyone believed, was carved from a single, enormous emerald. For centuries, it was one of the most valuable objects in Europe. Medieval writers said it was the dish from the Last Supper. Then, Napoleon decided he wanted that thing, and he hauled it back to Paris in 1806 as war loot. And somewhere along the way, it got broken. So when French scientists then examined the pieces, it was glass. Green Islamic glass. Probably from the 9th or 10th century. They sent it back in pieces, and it's still in Ganoa today. And you can still see the seams, where they glued it. Candidate number 2 is the Nanteos Cup. This one's a wooden bowl, and it looks like half of it's gone. The story says that monks fleeing Glastonbury, during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, carried it to Strata, Florida Abbey in Wales. And from there, to the Nanteos family estate, where for centuries, sick people would actually drink from it, and then, supposedly, be healed. The pieces are missing because some pilgrims decided to, uh, literally bite chunks off of it. So, there you have it. In 2014, it was stolen from a woman who borrowed it for that exact reason. And it turned up years later. Experts date it back to the 1300s. It's a medieval maser bowl. Old, but not 2000 years old. So, that's another one we can probably knock out. Candidate number 3 is the Antioch Chalice. It was dug up near Antioch, Turkey, around 1910. It's silver, it's gorgeous, and what got everyone so excited about it, is that it's a relatively plain silver cup. Inside an ornate, gilded cage, like the outer cup was built to protect an older one. For decades, it was actually toured as the Holy Grail. And it was even the star of the 1933 World's Fair. The Met in New York owns it now, and their analysis? 6th century, and probably not even a chalice. It's most likely a lamp. And candidate number 4, the one who shut down an entire museum. In 2014, two Spanish historians published a book claiming that a cup in the Basilica of San Isidoro in Leon was the real grail. Their evidence was two Egyptian parchments. They said traced the cup from Jerusalem to Cairo to Spain in the 11th century. Where it was then given to a princess named Urca. Within days, so many people showed up to see it, that the museum actually had to pull it off a display. The catch is that the cup itself is two Roman era onyx vessels fused together in the 11th century. So even if the parchments are real, they document what people believed in 1050. Not what happened in the year 33. So that's four. A glass dish, a wooden bowl, a lamp, and a medieval rectory. Remember what the Grail Knight said? It's the cup of a carpenter. And none of these are a cup of a- Literally none of them are a cup of a carpenter. But there is one more that I've been saving. Valencia, Spain. The Santo Calles. The first thing you notice is the top. It's small. A dark red-brown agate bowl. About three and a half inches across. Plain, no carving. The gold stem and the jewel base underneath were added in the Middle Ages. But the bowl itself is a different object entirely. And it was old before anyone touched it. In 1960, a Spanish archaeologist named Antonio Beltran examined the bowl and concluded it was made in Eastern Mediterranean. Egypt, Syria, or Palestine. Which means it's in the right age bracket and the right region. Now, that obviously doesn't make it the Grail. There were thousands of agate cups in the Roman world. But it means it's the only candidate on this list that could physically have been on the table in Jerusalem in the year 33. Now, the story has some hit or miss moments, and I will be honest with you about them. The tradition says Saint Peter carried the cup to Rome. The early popes used it. Then in the year 258, under Emperor Varelian's persecution, a deacon named Lawrence, Saint Lawrence, smuggled it out of Rome to his home region in Spain before he was executed. That part is tradition. There's not really any documents about it. But this is where the paper trail really starts. The cup was then kept at a monastery called San Juan de la Pina, a monastery built into a cliff in the Pyrenees. And in 1399, the King of Aragon took it from the monks in exchange for a gold chalice. And we have that document. Almost as a receipt, essentially, for the grail. From there, it then passed to the Aragonese royal family. And in 1437, it was given to the Vallecina Cathedral, where it has been ever since. 600 years in one place. And something I think about it is, remember, the whole film's final test is that the real grail is the plainest cup in the room. Valencia's cup is the plainest bowl of any of the candidates I've seen. No jewels on the cup itself. No carving. Just a stone bowl that a first century tradesman could have actually owned. And the church takes it extremely seriously. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass with it in 1982. Pope Benedict XVI used it in 2006. Neither of them declared it the grail, but they held it and they drank from it on camera. Is it the cup of Christ? No, no one can really prove that. No one ever really will prove that. But if you're asking which cup on earth is the right age from the right place with a documented chain of custody going back over 600 years, that's the one. Not the one in Petra. The one in Valencia. Which, to me, almost makes me a little happy because the movie, yeah, they send us to Jordan. But they filmed the tank scene and a lot of those scenes in Spain. They were closer to maybe the real grail than they actually realized. So, the truth behind the grail to me, the movie sends you to some awesome places. To Venice, to Austria, to Jordan. To a knight who's been waiting for 700 years. It's one of my favorite movie scenes because that image is so good. And I'd never realized until I started doing research for this video that it's built on a poem that a man in France didn't finish. The poet left a blank page. And for 800 years, knights, monks, poets, Nazis, historians, Spielberg, everyone has been writing on it. And that's perfect folklore. It's what a legend is. It's not a lie. It's a question no one's really allowed to answer. Percival sat in that hall, watched the grail go past, and he didn't ask what it was. So, we've been asking ever since. I really do. I think Indiana Jones Last Crusade is probably my favorite movie of all time. It is literally so perfect. I adore that movie. And the Holy Grail is something that I've always found fascinating as a child. And I still do to this day. Now, will we find it? Probably not. But it is something that always makes me just excited to think about. It's a lot like the Ark of the Covenant in that sense. It's not something that is a catch-all, you know? It's not something that is going to actually give you the divinity of Christ, but we search for it like it will. And I mean, it's been depicted in movies, TV shows, poems, everything else. But in reality, if we wanted to find that level of divinity, it's already right in front of us. All we have to do is reach out. And it's something that I always think about. But this video is awesome. Again, the Holy Grail of videos as I called it last week. I love it. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for the wonderful support I've seen in the last two parts. I've really enjoyed this series. You've really enjoyed this series. So that's great. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. Share it to your friends, whatever you feel like doing. It really does help the channel. And again, all of that's free. I'm not charging you for that. Now, if you want to be charged, we do have a channel membership that gives you a bunch of perks, including seeing his videos early. And so that's super fun. I want to say thank you to my channel members, Teddy Perez, Raylan, and CD Free. I really do appreciate you guys and the support y'all give the channel. With that being said, I want to take care of a few housekeeping things. Guys, these last two videos have been awesome. We're now at over 2,000 subscribers, which is just so insane. I love it. Thank y'all so much for subscribing. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you so much for watching the videos. Again, it is just awesome. I'm very blessed to have all of you in my life and y'all have made it worth living. So thank y'all so much and have a blessed day.