The Chalice of Ecstacy

The collective tradition of mankind is endowed with a relative infallibility, and when rightly interpreted, must represent the largest truth, the most perfect beauty and the purest goodness known on earth. This transcendental truth and goodness and beauty represents the divine substratum of human nature, the ideal humanity which lies above and behind the aberrations of individuals, races and periods. It is not subjected, as are the latter, to Time and Circumstance or to the limitations from which the appearance of error, evil and deformity seem to spring. The Legend of Parzival is not subject to Time or Circumstance; it represents a glimpse of the Eternal Reality, the Everpresent Here and Now. The circumstances of its enactment and the place wherein the festival is beheld, need not be sought outside the Human Heart that has learned to beat in time and tune with the Soul of the World. All who are born of "Heart's Affliction" must eventually find their way to that spot where they "Scarcely move, yet swiftly seem to run" and having become one with "The Way, The Truth and The Life" they will discover that the shifting scenes of the world they had thought to be so real, will pass by them as a pageant until the Vision of the Grail Itself is presented to their pure Understanding. It is in the hope of awakening some spark of the smouldering fire of this inner consciousness in the hearts of those who may read these lines - not having previously understood the Legend - and from that spark enkindling a great fire that will burn up the veils which hide man from Himself - from God - that I have dared to add these fragments to the great mass of Grail Literature already given to the world.