-The temple of mysteries-

The German poet Albrecht von Sharffenberg wrote a work entitled ‘’The young Titurel’’ (1270), which deals with the early history of the Grail family and in particular with Titurel, the grandfather of Parzival. Included in the poem are a number of verses describing the temple of the Grail in some detail: in the land of salvation, in the forest of salvation, lies a solitary mountain called the mountain of Salvation, which King Titurel surrounded by a wall and on which he built a costly castle to serve as the Temple of the Grail because the Grail at that time had no fixed place, but floated, invisible, in the air. Albrecht goes on to describe how the mountain was of onyx, cleared of earth on the top, and then polished until it shone like the moon. The temple was high, round, domed and had a roof of gold. Inside, the celling was encrusted with sapphires to represent the blue sky and studded with carbuncles for stars. A gold sun and a silver moon moved across the hemispheres by artificial means, and cymbals were struck to indicate the passing of the canonical hours. The whole of the temple was rich in gold and encrusted with jewels. For many years this was assumed to be no more than a piece of literary artifice, until in this century scholars drew attention to an actual site which bore a remarkable resemblance to Albrecht’s description of the Grail temple. At the beginning of the seventh century A.D. the Persian king Chosroes II built a palace, which he called the Takht-e-Taqdis, or Throne of Arches (now called Takht-e-Soleymān) on the holy mountain of Shîz, in Iran. This was the most sacred spot in his whole realm, containing a sanctuary of the holy fire and being the reputed birthplace of Zoroaster. Long before the Takht was built, there stood an ancient circular temple of the holy fire that was worshipped by the Manichaeans. Here, the kings of the Sassanian line, to which Chosroes belonged, held seasonal rituals to ensure the health of the land; and when the sanctuary was laid to waste the country did indeed seem to die; just as in the Grail stories, the infertile state of the waste land was seen as a direct consequence of the Grail king's symbolic death. From archaeological evidence it becomes clear that the Grail temple and the Takht share many similarities. Like the Grail temple, it was domed, roofed with gold and lined with blue stones to represent the sky. There were stars, the sun and moon and astrological and astronomical charts outlined in jewels. The whole structure of the Takht was built above a hidden pit in which teams of horses walked around, causing the building to revolve with the seasons and to help with the calculation of astronomical and astrological observances. This recalls the turning castles of Celtic myth and the turning island from the Grail stories from Robert de Boron. Like many descriptions of the Grail temple, the Takht stood beside a great lake, said to be bottomless. In 1937 researchers found that the mineral waters of the lake had made a deposit of a gleaming crust that resembled onyx, just like in the descriptions of Albrecht, who described in the 13th century a pagan temple from the 6th century because it went down in history as the place were the most sacred relic, the ’’True Cross’’, was housed after Chosroes captured Jerusalem in 614 A.D.The Byzantine emperor Heraclius destroyed the temple in 629 A.D. This episode was much reported in the Middle Ages and might have formed the inspiration for Albrecht's work in the 13th century. Both the Takht and the Manichaean structure gave rise to the idea of the Grail temple.

Text: John Matthews, 1981 The Grail: Quest for the eternal, pp. 23-24
Image: The site of Takht-e Soleymān (Persian: تخت سلیمان) (Azerbaijani: Təxti Süleyman), also known as Shiz or Azar Goshnasp in West Azerbaijan, Iran

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