Note 337 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The luxuriant crop of stories of the Holy Grail was not inspired originally by mere literary invention. A tradition sprung from the fountain-head of all mythology, the parent-story of the Destruction of Mankind, provided the materials which a series of writers elaborated into the varied assortment of legends of the Mother Pot. The true meaning of the Quest of the Holy Grail can be understood only by reading the fabled accounts of it in the light of the ancient search for the elixir of life and the historical development of the narrative describing that search.
A concise summary of the Grail literature will be found in Jessie L. Weston's "The Quest of the Holy Grail" (1913). Her theory will be found, after some slight modifications, to fall into line with the general argument of this book.
Mr. F.L Ll.Griffith tells me that the Egyptian hieroglyphic for the verb "coire cum" gives frank expression to the real meaning of the symbolism of the pot as the matrix which receives the seed. The same idea provides the material for the incident of the birth of Drona (the pot-born) in the Adi Parva (Sections CXXXI, CXXXIX, and CLXVIII, in Roy's translation) of the Mahabharata, to which Mr. Donald A. Mackenzie has kindly called my attention. Drona was conceived in a pot from the seed of a Rishi. A widespread variant of the same story is the conception of a child from a drop of blood in a pot (see, for example, Hartland, "Legend of Perseus," Vol. I, pp. 98 and 144). If the pot can thus create a human being, it is easy to understand how it acquired its reputation of being also able to multiply food and provide an inexhaustible supply. Similarly, all substances, such as barley, rice, gold, pearls, and jade, to which the possession of a special vital essence or "soul substance" was attributed, were believed to be able to reproduce themselves and so increase in quantity of their own activities. As "givers of life" they were also able to add to their own life-substance, in other words to grow like any other living being.