Chapter 6 The Second Holy Cabinet and the Holy Grail-2

When I was reading Parsifal in the summer of 1989, I noticed the startling possibility that this fictional "Holy Grail" might have been used by the author as a veiled symbol for the Ark of the Covenant. This leads me to another hypothesis: that there may be another figure behind Wolfram von Eschenbach's "destined" Grail hero, and once we know who he is, Then you will know the way to the core of the mystery of the ark.That is why the poet has hidden the man's true identity behind a layer of mysterious and sometimes deliberately misleading details. I thought that this figure could not be anyone else but Menelik.He was the son of Queen Sheba and King Solomon, and according to Abyssinian legend, Menelik brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.

If some of this conjecture is true, then I hope to find further clues from "Parsifal".These clues are of a cryptographic nature, may be obscured by frequent false clues, may be scattered in many chapters that are quite different from each other, and may be deliberately obscured by the author.Still, if these clues are brought together, and if their true meaning is understood, they may still underscore the Ark's involvement with Ethiopia. Rosewood and Ivory In a chapter of Parsifal I found the first clue of its kind.That chapter talks about a very distant country called "Zazamanko" where the skin of the inhabitants is "black as night."A wandering European aristocrat came to this country, and his name was "Gamlet Anru".There he fell in love with a woman who was the equivalent of a queen, "Bellacany the Fair and Faithful".

"Belakani" makes me think that it seems to be an echo of "Makeda", the Ethiopian name of the Queen of Sheba, whom I heard when I visited Axum in 1983.I also know that in Muslim legend this same monarch is called "Bilquis". Now that I know Wolfram's penchant for inventing new words, of putting old ones together to create interesting new names, it seems to me premature to rule out one possibility.That possibility is that the name "Belacane" is a combination of "Birges" and "Sister Mark".And it would be doubly rash to think that she was not the queen of Sheba because the poet described her as "a black queen."

The first chapter of "Parsifal" tells the love story of Belacanny and Gamlet in detail. Through more careful study, I found that there are some plots in it that are very similar to King Solomon in "The Glory of Kings". The story with the Queen of Sheba, and many other Ethiopian legends also refer to this story, but the version is slightly different. This connection makes me feel that Wolfram spends a lot of time explicitly talking about Gamlet being white like Solomon and Bellacney being black like Makeda. Fortuitous coincidence. For example, after the "white-skinned" knight from Anjou, France, came to Zazamenco, Bellacani once said to her maid: "He has a different complexion from ours. I hope this is not his fault." This was certainly no shortcoming, for in the following weeks Bellacany and Gamlett were in a feverish affair, one romance after another, culminating in a bedroom in Bellacany's bedchamber:

The queen conquered him with her black hands.In the bedroom there was a rich bed with sable sheets, on which a private new honor awaited him.There were only the two of them in the room, and the young maids had left and closed the bedroom door.The queen bestows sweet and noble love on her sweetheart, Gamlet, though their skins hardly match. The lovers got married.Belacanne, however, was an unbaptized pagan, and therefore Christian Gamlet, a knight of many chivalrous deeds, fled from Zazamenco when his wife was "twelve weeks pregnant," He left her this letter: I sail away like a thief.In order to save us from tears, I had to slip away quietly.Ma'am, I can't help but say to you: If your beliefs are consistent with mine, I will stay with you for the rest of my life.Even now, my love for you is still giving me endless torture!If our child were a boy, I swear he would be very brave.

Long after Gamlett left, he still suffered from self-blame because "that dark woman was more precious than his life".Later he said: Now, many ignorant fellows would think that I left her because of her dark skin.But in my eyes, she is as bright as the sun!It pains me to think of her incomparable femininity, for if nobility is a shield, she is the shield's heart. The above is the love story of Bellacany and Gamlett.What became of their children? She conceived to term and gave birth to a son.His skin is a mixture of black and white.It pleases God to make him a miracle because he is both black and white.The queen leaned down and kissed the white parts of her son's body over and over again.She named her child "Falafiz of Anru".He grew up to be a warrior, passed through the entire forest, broke countless spears, and pierced countless shields.His hair and the color of his skin complement each other like a magpie.

Wolfram emphasizes, in the most graphic way possible, that Falaifiz is biracial, the product of the union of a black woman and a white man.Not only that, but the half-breed Falafiz will play a key role in the story of Parsifal.His father, the amorous Gamlet, returned to Europe after deserting Belacany, and married a queen named "Hezrod" and soon impregnated her.Later, Gamlet abandoned her again, took many adventures in various places, won honor in a series of battles, and was finally killed. Wolfram said: "Two weeks after Gamliel's death, Herzrod gave birth to a baby boy of such a size that she almost died." The boy was Parsifal, the same as Wolfram. The protagonist of the story of the same name; moreover, since his father is Gamlet, Parsifal is also the half-brother of Falafiz.

I found that in "King's Glory" and some other Ethiopian legends, there are also many characters, and the complex relationship between them is also similar to that between Gamlet, Belacanni, Falafiz and Parsifal. relationship between.The similarity is indirect, but I still hope to find such fascinating hints in Wolfram's work.And so I became more and more confident that he had planted a trail for us which, through traps and labyrinths, would at last lead me to Ethiopia. The repeated contrast between the black Bellacine and the white Gamlet is an inescapable feature of the opening parts of Parsifal.In "King's Glory," the lovers are King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.Like Gamlett and Bellacney, they also make love in the bedroom.Like Gamlet and Belacani, one of them (this time it was Makeda, Queen of Sheba) abandoned the other for a long journey.Like Gamlet and Belacanne, the product of their union is a hybrid, this time Menelik.Still like Gamlett and Bellacney, in the relevant passages, the author also repeatedly emphasizes the difference in skin color between the two, this time in "The Glory of the King".In one typical scene, King Solomon of Judea is condemned for Menelik's theft of the Ark, and this passage makes it very clear:

Your son stole the Ark of the Covenant.The son you begot was also born of a foreigner, and God did not command you to marry her.In other words, she is an Ethiopian woman who has a different color from yours, does not belong to the same country as you, and is of black race. In addition, there is something in common between Menelik and Falaifiz, and that is not just the same in the point of being half-breed.For example, there is something peculiar about the name Feirefiz itself.What language does it belong to?What's the meaning? After checking, I found that literary critics have a fairly solid view on this issue.Most of them saw the oddly pronounced name as a typical neologism coined by Wolfram, based on the French "vair fils," meaning "son with black and white spots."However, another school of thought believes it comes from the French "vrai fils" ("son of one's own"), which is not unreasonable.

I can't find any direct comparison of the two etymologies in The King's Glory (although in chapter 36, Solomon says, upon meeting Menelik for the first time: "You see, this is my son. ").However, there is another Ethiopian version of this legend. Although the plot is slightly different, it is also an ancient version. It was translated into English by Professor Erno Ritman of Princeton University in 1904.It also describes Solomon's first encounter with Menelik, with the following passage: Menelik immediately walked up to him, stretched out his hand to greet him, and Solomon said, "You are my son."

In other words, this is "vrai fils" in French (natural son - translator's note) ah! circuitous mechanism Coincidences like this make it harder and harder for me to resist the idea that Wolfram does link his Falaifitz with Menelik.Why did he do this? I think this is not because he was influenced by "King's Glory" (the scholar Helen Adolf thought so in the 1940s), but because he already knew at that time that the final whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant was in Ethiopia, because He has coded this information into "Parsifal".Therefore, "Parsifal" is a literary "treasure-hunting secret map", which uses the Holy Grail as a secret code of the Ark of the Covenant. Wolfram has always been obsessed with ingenuity, with a penchant for creating word tricks that are as confusing as they are entertaining.However, I feel that I have seen through most of the illusions he creates, as well as the deceptions he often employs to lure the reader away from the secret that lies at the heart of the story.Therefore, I am not puzzled by the following description in the book-Falaifiz was not the one who sought the Holy Grail, and he did not get the honor of finding this precious antiquity in the end.Because this ending will appear too direct, it is clearly a pointing arrow.Besides, Wolfram could not tolerate the fact that a pagan half-breed of a black queen became the hero of a romantic saga intended to entertain medieval European Christians. For these reasons, I think the clever German poet would be perfectly content with an ending in which the pure white, virtuous Parsifal wins the imaginary grail which is the only thing of interest to most of his readers. things.At the same time, in the eyes of the few knowledgeable people, the person who showed the way to the Ark of the Covenant should be the "son" Falafiz. But I also understand that to support this hypothesis, I need more solid evidence than just a series of coincidences—no matter how meaningful and fascinating those coincidences may seem.So I embarked on the mentally exhausting task of perusing Parsifal again. I finally found what I was looking for.Based on my previous readings, I recall that Falaifez ended up marrying Le Pens de Sonia.She is the perfect and pure woman carrying the Holy Grail, she seems to be shrouded in a halo of holiness and power, and she always appears and disappears in the story. I discovered a detail, small but significant, hidden in a thread I hadn't seen before: In the happy ending provided by Wolfram, Falaise and Le Pens de Soki had a son named "Prester John". It would be great if, then, then and there, I could prove that the Terse Salvaesche was in fact the land where Prester John ruled.Such a direct connection at least strongly supports my theory that Wolfram's Parsifal is a "treasure map".Unfortunately, there is nothing in Parsifal to confirm this view: the "land of the Holy Grail" is mentioned in the book only in the most illusory and vague language, and it is impossible to show it at all. His king was "John the Priest". I'm almost on the verge of coming to that conclusion.Full of optimism, I strode down a deeply disappointing cul-de-sac, only to discover another medieval German epic in which Priest John was indeed the keeper of the Holy Grail. The epic, called Der Jungerer Titurel, was so close in style to the Parsifal that many scholars have long attributed Wolfram to its author (from the thirteenth century onwards there is such a view).However, in a more recent period, it was discovered that its real author was a writer a little later than Wolfram.The author is said to be Albrecht von Saffenberg, who compiled Tituller the Younger between 1270 and 1275 (about 15 years after Wolfram's death) , based on fragments of previously unpublished work by Wolfram.Indeed, Albrecht's work resembles his teacher's so much that he himself has been identified as Wolfram, "taking not only his name and subject matter but his writing as narrator" style, and even inherited the details of the experiences of his characters." I know that there is a deep-rooted tradition in medieval literature, that is: the writers of later generations tend to like to continue and complete the works of their predecessors.Wolfram's Parsifal itself comes from the story of the Holy Grail written by Chrétien de Troyer.It now appears that the task of providing the story with an ending, one of finding the Grail in its final resting place, was left to a third poet, Albrecht. It is clearly declared in "Little Titullaire" that this final resting place is the kingdom ruled by Priest King John.I think that in the literature on the Holy Grail, such a declaration is of great significance, not only that, but this news was provided by a follower of Wolfram, who seems to be uniquely qualified to get Wolfram Ram's own notes and notes.This, I think, is just some kind of devious mechanism that the "Master" set up to ensure that his Ethiopian secrets would not be written too explicitly in Parsifal. passed on to future generations. This conclusion may or may not be reasonable.Its significance, however, lies not so much in its academic merit as in the fact that it encouraged me to take Wolfram's brief account of "Priest John" seriously, and to persevere in my investigation .As it will later prove, the investigation, though labor-intensive, ultimately yielded considerable results. The purpose of the investigation was to find an answer to a question: Was Wolfram really having an Ethiopian king in mind when he mentioned "Priest John"? Initial indications were that he didn't think so.In fact, he expressly declares that "Priest John" was born in "India"--the book says that Falafiz is clearly the king of this country, and after the adventures described in the Parsifal, Falaise and Le Pence de Sogny returned to the country.To complicate the picture, the same paragraph goes on to say that "India" is also called "Tribalibot" (meaning: we call it "India" here, here is " Terry Baribout"). I looked up some of the earlier chapters and found passages that refer to Falafiz as "King of Tribaribaut".This name has always been so, as I now know: His son "Priest John" eventually succeeded him as King of Tribaribaut/India.However, I can hardly forget that Falafiz himself is the son of Queen Belacanni of the kingdom of "Zazamanco".So I know that Wolfram is not surprised when he refers to Falaifiz as "King of Zazamenco". The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from these odd assortment of titles is that "Zazamanko," "Tri Balibaut," and "India" are all one and the same place.But could this place be Ethiopia?Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that Wolfram had always had the Indian subcontinent in mind when he wrote (since he did say the name "India")? I decided to go back to the real origin of "Priest John" and see if I could shed more light on this puzzle. a true king I discovered that the name "John the Prester" did not exist before the 12th century.In the 12th century, the European Crusaders occupied the holy city of Jerusalem for more than 80 years, and they were driven away by the Arabs in 1187).Historians believe that the first historical mention of "Priest John" appears around the middle of this period, in the Chronicle written by Archbishop Otto of Freisingen in 1145.The archbishop said he had received the news from a Syrian priest, who mentioned in his Chronicle a certain "John, rex et sacerdos"—a Christian who lived in "The Farthest East," commanding armies which he apparently intended to place at the disposal of the defenders of Jerusalem.It is said that this "Priest King John - so it is easier for people to know his identity" is rich in the world, and even the king's staff is made of pure emerald. Later, in 1165, a letter was widely circulated in Europe. It is said that it was written by the priest John, and he wrote to "all Christian kings, especially Emperor Manuel of Constantinople and Emperor Frey of the Roman Empire." Derek I".The letter, full of the most absurd and extraordinary expressions, declares that, besides all this, Prester John's land is divided into four parts "by virtue of the multitude of Indians." In AD 1177, Pope Alexander III (from Venice) wrote a letter to "Dearest Christian Godson John, fabulous and noble King of the Indians". Although the pope knew that he was replying to the author of the 1165 letter, he made it clear that he had also learned about this John from another source.For example, he mentions "Dr. Philip", the personal physician of Priest John.It is said that an envoy of Priest John met the physician in Jerusalem. It is worth noting that these envoys, known as "the upper classes of the monarchy", expressed a wish of the king.Even the letter of 1165 does not mention the will, that is: to build a sanctuary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.The pope responded as follows: What you have done is an act of incomparable nobility and generosity, and the less you boast of your wealth and power, the more we shall regard your desire to build (an altar) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord in Jerusalem as your special offering. There are many mysteries in these 12th-century documents, but one thing is clear: the early days of Prester John's reign were clearly associated with "India."I looked into this a bit more and concluded that it was true because of the repeated mention in the literature that the land that John the Prester ruled was "India", or more broadly several places called "India". However, apparently none of these authoritative medieval authors knew exactly where that "India" (or those places that were called "India") was.It is also evident that when they refer to "India" they seldom refer to the Indian subcontinent, but mostly to some other place, perhaps in Africa, perhaps somewhere else - though no one seems to know exactly where. I investigated the matter further and came to understand the approximate source of all these uncertainties: there was a long-standing confusion of terminology over a thousand years before the earliest mention of the period of Prester John, That is how often "India" and "Ethiopia" are confused.In fact, from the 1st century AD (at that time, the ancient Roman poet Virgil once wrote: the Nile River in "India" was flooded), at least until the time of Marco Polo (at that time, all countries along the Indian Ocean were still called "India"). "), the terms "Ethiopia" and "India" have been used interchangeably. An ancient example of this comes from the writings of the 4th century AD Byzantine theologian Rufinus.He edited a book detailing the conversion of Ethiopians to Christianity, which I studied in 1983.The details in this important treatise include places like Axum, but also some recognized historical figures (such as Frumentius and King Ezana).These details leave no doubt that the country Rufinus refers to is in fact Ethiopia, although he always refers to it as "India." This, explains one historian, is because "early geographers always spoke of Ethiopia as the western frontier of that great Indian empire".More than that, it appears that this same geographical error, together with the curious letter circulating in the twelfth century, had given rise to the impression that "John the Prester" was an Asian king, or rather an Indian king. This impression, though false, has been tenaciously confirmed: long after "Prester John" had ceased to be a mythical figure, long after his kingdom had been fixed in the Horn of Africa, it persisted.For example, at the end of the 13th century AD, Marco Polo once wrote: "Abyssinia is a vast land called Middle India or Second India, whose king is a Christian." This sentence represents Awareness of the traditional doctrines of his time. Similarly, in the 14th century AD, the Florentine traveler Simone Sigli still referred to "Giovanni the Priest King" as a monarch living in India, and that "India" was actually located on the borders of the Egyptian Sultan , whose king was once described as the "Lord of the Nile", is said to be able to control the Nile River that flows into Egypt. In the rather late 16th century, Portugal sent its first official mission to Ethiopia, whose members still thought they were going to meet "King John the Priest of India".Later, Father Francisco Alvarez made an authoritative account of this mission.He landed at the Red Sea port of Massawa in April 1520, and spent six years traveling throughout Ethiopia.The title of his book, though undoubtedly within the continent of Africa, reflects that ancient geographical error: The Reality of the Country of Priest John of India. Throughout this informative work of high scholarly value, Alvarez consistently refers to the Ethiopian emperor as "Priest King" or "Priest King John." I can also attest that much earlier than this (that is, in 1352), Franciscan de Giovanni, papal ambassador to Asia, said in his Chronicle: "Ethiopia is inhabited by black people. race of people, and the country is called the country of Prester John." Similarly, in 1328, a priest named Jordanus "Katalani" also called the king of Ethiopia "Priest John" .Later, in 1459, Fra Malo drew a map of the known world at that time, which was widely valued. In it, a city that belongs to the territory of Ethiopia today was marked in red: "This is the priest King John the capital of the country." Indeed, I am perplexed as I go over the contradictory accounts before me: some seem to unequivocally state John the Priest as being in Ethiopia; King of a place called "India"; others say that he was in India itself—or in some other country in the Far East. But behind all this chaos there seems to be one certainty: the real Priest John, the source of all this myth, must after all be a monarch of Ethiopia—the only kingdom that ever existed in the world during the Middle Ages, outside Europe. The only Christian kingdom.Thus, Wolfram speaks of "India" being ruled by "John the Prester," the son of Faléfiz and Le Pens de Soni, a Christian—here he says " India" can only be Ethiopia. I looked through the Encyclopaedia Britannica for a final statement that I hope is definitive.As a result, I saw the following explanation: It is not impossible that the title "Priest John" has been given to kings of Abyssinia from very early times, although the association was at one point referred to as "Priest John was Asian" overshadowed by this popular legend.The reason for saying this person is Indian and Ethiopian is to confuse Ethiopia and India, and its origins can be traced back to Virgil, and possibly even earlier. This entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica ends with the following passage, which is of great importance to my investigation.It refers to the correspondence between the Pope and John the Prester, which, as already stated, took place in the second half of the century: In 1177 AD, Pope Alexander III sent a letter to the monarch from Venice. No matter how the Pope imagined the geographical location of the king's country at that time, his real recipient could only be the king of Abyssinia at that time.Please pay attention to one point: the "upper class of the monarchy" that Dr. Philip saw in the East must also be the envoy of a real monarch who holds the royal power, not a phantom representative.Whoever showed his willingness to fulfill the commission of building an altar in Jerusalem...must have been a true king.Not only that, but we also know that the Ethiopian Church did have a chapel and altar for a long time in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I found out shortly afterwards that this was indeed the case.That chapel and altar were first given to the Ethiopians in AD 1189, but not by Pope Alexander III (who was no longer empowered to grant such favors) but by the Muslim Salah al-Din, who in 1187 Captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders.Most importantly, these privileges in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were obtained directly from Saladin by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.The requester was none other than the King of Ethiopia himself. A decade after these events, mysterious drawings of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant appeared on anonymous stone buildings in northern France, and a statue of the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba appeared in the north corridor of Chartres cathedral in France.Likewise, Wolfram von Eschenbach began writing Parsifal 10 years after these events. Please pay attention to more updated free e-books Please pay attention to more updated free e-books Nay, it seems to me that none of these could be mere coincidences, on the contrary, I now feel that the background circumstances have very strongly supported my hypothesis that the carvings of Chartres Cathedral and Wolfram That striking narrative poem was clearly intended to serve as some kind of cryptic treasure map.And, though the exact location of the treasure is not shown on these maps, there seems little doubt that the place of the treasure shown on these maps can only be Ethiopia—the kingdom ruled by Prester John, the The final location of the imaginary Grail, and thus (if my theory is correct) is where the Ark of the Covenant will be found, and the real object that the Holy Grail symbolizes is the Ark of the Covenant. However, now several other problems have arisen: — How did the news that the Ark of the Covenant might be in Ethiopia reach a German poet and a group of French icon-sculptors in the 12th century? —What connects the former to the latter?This is because if the latter both create works of art in which the same information is encoded, they must be related in some way to the former. ——Finally, why would some people prefer to show the secret of the Ark's whereabouts through storytelling and carving?I have come almost to the conclusion that this was done to ensure the transmission of the secret to subsequent generations.At the same time, though, the ciphers used here, especially those used by Wolfram, have been exceptionally difficult to crack.I myself have all the research materials of the 12th century at hand, and I have obtained the current results. This is entirely because I have been to the city of Axum, so I have a preconception that the Ark of the Covenant may be in Ethiopia.But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was impossible for anyone to gain any convenience and advantage.That is to say, there is no way that the information hidden in Parsifal could have been codified in the Middle Ages—unless some people were able to acquire a very special kind of knowledge that only a few people had, creating a kind of A password that can be cracked.So I think it's logical to assume that there must have been such people, but who could they be? I did find some Europeans who fit the above criteria perfectly.They were part of the crusaders who took Jerusalem and were present in large numbers in Jerusalem in the 12th century. When they were in Jerusalem in 1145, the legend of "John the Priest" was first circulating there. They were still in Jerusalem in 1177, and envoys of the Ethiopian king had visited that holy city to find an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.So it is entirely possible that these Ethiopians came into direct contact with those Europeans. Not only that, but these Europeans also had a highly secretive organization and often used codes in long-distance international communications.In addition, these people were also involved in the evolution and spread of Gothic architecture in Europe (more specifically, they may have participated in the construction and carving of Chartres Cathedral). Finally, and most importantly: Wolfram von Eschenbach mentioned these people by name several times.I came across that name while researching the curious chalice that the Chartres sculptors placed in the left hand of their supposed priest-king statue of Melchizedek (which happens to be almost The only statue of Zedek in the whole of medieval Europe). These men were powerful, powerful, and well-traveled. What on earth were their names? The official full name of their organization is "The Poor Knights of Christ and Solomon's Temple", but its members are known as "Templars" or "Knights Templars".Essentially, this is a religious organization whose members are monks.For most of the 12th century, the organization was based at the site of Solomon's Temple in the city of Jerusalem, where the Ark of the Covenant mysteriously disappeared during Old Testament times.