Grails and Grace: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

“Ask yourself, why do you seek the Cup of Christ? Is it for His glory, or for yours?”

Yesterday I wrote about Raiders of the Lost Ark and about how great it is. But let’s not forget it’s part of a franchise, one of the rare kind where the other films mostly stand up to the original. And, as I was talking about how Raiders is based in Judaism and the Old Testament, today I figured I’d go to the other end of the Bible: step forward Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and its quest for the Holy Grail.

Only despite the whole Da Vinci Code kerfuffle, there’s a problem. Because the Holy Grail isn’t in the Bible, or at least not in any direct way.

Jesus coins the wine/blood symbolism at the Last Supper but there’s no great description of a Grail, they just use a cup to drink from. Boring and conventional I know, but there you go. No, the Holy Grail is basically a medieval plot device.

See, somewhere between 1181 and 1190, a French poet called Chretian de Troyes wrote Perceval: The Story of the Grail. During the poem, Perceval manages to impress King Arthur, fall in love, meets the Fisher King and has a vision of the Grail. Here it’s an object of power, capable of healing the Fisher King if only Perceval asks the right questions – which he fails to do. It’s nothing to do with the Bloodline of Christ, it’s just the cup that the King’s communion is carried in, important because that’s the only food and drink he’s receiving.

The Grail became holy around a decade later, when Robort de Boron fills in the gaps of its history – Joseph of Arimathea uses the cup from the Last Supper to collect some of Christ’s blood after the crucifixion, eventually making his way to Britain (which links in with an early tradition that had Joseph and a bunch of other minor characters from the Gospels making their way across Europe, as well as being the source of the idea that Jesus once visited England as a boy – cue Jerusalem). None of this really has anything to do with the Bible – effectively it’s New Testament fanfic. Somewhere along the line the Grail became the object of a quest carried out by Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and it became enshrined in literature as a sacred macguffin.

And in a lot of ways, that’s the Grail’s purpose in The Last Crusade – it’s an excuse to reconcile Indy with his father, and once this happens, the Grail is lost again. However, it’s this story, contrasted with the actions of the film’s antagonists, that shows that Indy is capable of understanding, and experiencing grace.

Look at the film’s bad guy. Donovan is a suave but ruthless businessman obsessed with the Grail and its potential to bring him immortality. To this end he aligns himself with the Nazis and manipulates both of the Joneses; after all, they’re all really just tools to help him live forever. It’s that arrogance, however, that ultimately damns him – when confronted with a roomful of potential Grails, from which he must drink to receive eternal life, he picks the most ornate. He sees the world from a pedestal and the Grail as his prize – of course it’s going to be shiny and jewel-encrusted. But whoops, it’s the wrong one and it ages him to death instead – “He chose…poorly,” the Grail’s guardian wryly comments. Donovan’s Grail quest was all about the prize, not the lessons learned along the way – after all, he never learned them because the other characters did all the work.

Indy, on the other hand, has purer motivations – he just wants to save his dad’s life and go home. And yet because of this, because his quest is noble and involves risking his neck for that of another, Indy is able to succeed. He does his homework (“Jehovah is spelled with an ‘I!'”), he risks his life, and he’s finally able to act with humility and wisdom – he doesn’t want to be a king, he just wants his dad back. “That’s not the cup of a carpenter,” he mutters about Donovan’s false grail, before picking the cheapest and most inconspicuous cup on offer. This is the right choice, because this is the Cup of Christ and the Grail and it’s associated quest reflects this – humility, wisdom, self-sacrifice, reconciliation. The Christian concept of humanity being reconciled back to God is symbolised through the Spielbergian theme of a son’s relationship with his father, and once this happens the Grail is no longer needed – it disappears and its temple collapses, job done, and all that remains for our heroes to do is return home wiser than when they set out.

Heck, even the audience is enlightened in the final moments – we find out that Indy named himself after the family dog.

I guess it’s appropriate that a trilogy (let’s put aside The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the moment) that began with Indy confronted by the Wrath of God (in the form of the opened Ark of the Covenant) should end with him encountering God’s grace – judgement and mercy meet around the Easter story in which the Grail myth has its origins. The prodigals return home and a fracture family is reunited. We’ve seen wrath – and melted Nazis – now we get to see healing.

There’s another Indy film after this, of course, but that plays with sci-fi more than it does with myth and somehow it’s weaker for it – it tries to emulate fifties B-movies, but bringing in aliens and Communists (the interchangeable ‘Other’ of films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) weakens it somehow – Indy seems to be the detrrmined hero who doesn’t know when to stop even when divine forces are moving around him. It’s that determination and heroism that brings him a measure of healing in The Last Crusade. I’d say he deserved it, but that wouldn’t be grace – Indy’s always been a rough diamond for all his heroism.

But even rogues can sometimes be pilgrims.

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Raiding the Lost Ark: What Indiana Jones and the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have in common

Apparently yesterday saw an anniversary screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hosted by Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. I can only assume that my invitation went missing in the post somehow, because I wasn’t there alongside Simon Pegg and Lost creator Damon Lindelof (who recently wrote a love letter to Raiders).

Raiders is an awesome film, of course, one of those movies where everything, from the direction to the story to the casting to Harrison Ford’s dysentery conspire to capture lightning in a bottle in a way that modern blockbusters often fail to manage. It’s a pure-blooded classic, from the opening scene (BOULDER!) to the ending (BOXES!) via divine retribution (GOD SMITING NAZIS!) and it’s fantastic. Ford could go mad and take the lead role in a new Catwoman movie and we’d still forgive him, simply because he’s Han AND Indy. The guy gets a pass just because of that. He’s even inspired the coolest Mr. Potato Head.

But part of the power of Raiders is that it’s rooted in religion and folklore, the stakes of the movie hanging on both the evil of the Nazis, and concepts of the Old Testament Wrath of God. The Ark has power beyonf human imagining and that raises it beyond a plot MacGuffin to something far scarier – frankly, none of the characters, good or bad, should be going anywhere near it.

This is pretty true to the Biblical accounts. Here’s the story: Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt after God rains down plagues on Pharoah and parts the Red Sea. Following this, God makes a covenant, or agreement, with the fledgling Israel – this is marked by the 10 Commandments and a box – ark – in which to keep them (I wrote a little about the guy who built the ark here). This Ark became a physical symbol of God’s presence with the Israelites, going before them in battle, infused by the holy power of God and impossible to touch with your bare hands.

This is where Raiders draws upon the biblical texts – there are stories of people dying after touching the Ark and, when it’s captured by the Philistines, they’re struck by a plague of, well, hemorrhoids. The Ark is not something to be messed with.

Anyway, eventually the Babylonians conquered Israel and the Ark disappears from view. No-one knows what happened to it, and it’s at this point that it passes from religious history into rumour, folklore and mythology. Raiders suggests it ended up buried in Egypt, waiting for some hubristic Nazis to dig it up. There are, however, other ideas…

One of the apocryphal (non-canonical) biblical texts, 2 Maccabees, says that the prophet Jeremiah realised that Israel was going down and buried the Ark in an unknown cave, not to be revealed until God Himself made it known.

Meanwhile, others lay claim to safeguarding the Ark, most famously Ethiopia. Apparently there is an artifact kept in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, Axum, that may of may not be the Ark. The Glory of Kings, a text written in 1225 to legitimise the Ethiopian royal family, says that it’s there, and all Ethiopian churches contain a replica of the Ark. Interestingly, a while ago the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church said he was going to reveal the truth about the Ark; the next day he changed his mind. This doesn’t exactly help quash speculation.

Then there are the Lemba people of southern Africa, who have a tradition of a mysterious but sacred artifact known as the Ngoma Lungundu, “the drum that thunders” (implying the voice of God). What may a replica of the Ark is on display in Zimbabwe, after being hidden away in a storeroom for years… Which sounds a little familiar.

It’s not just Africa making claims. At the turn of the 20th century there was even speculation that the Ark was in Ireland, with some enthusiasts starting to dig up the Hill of Tara until someone had the sense to stop them before they destroyed one of the country’s spiritual centres.

The fact is, we don’t know what happened to the Ark of Covenant, and that worked in the favour of Raiders – at the end of the film the Ark is lost again, this time to the forces of bureaucracy. Maybe it’s for the best – you don’t mess around with the infinite, to paraphrase another movie. For an archeologist, Indy doesn’t have much success with getting his finds back home – he’s not working with history, he’s working with faith, religion, the divine. “It belongs in a museum,” he says during another of his adventures, but that’s not always true – in the case of the Ark he has to close his eyes and stay out of the way. It’s not often that a movie has something visceral to say about the power of God.

Fortunately Raiders isn’t any old movie.

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Riots, Martians and Spring-Heeled Jack: How a bit of panic makes us weird, and how Twitter sometimes doesn’t help

As you may be aware, there has been a spot of bother in England over the last few days. Rioters across London, Birmingham, Manchester and other towns and cities went on the rampage, with no clear explanation as yet. However, something else was going on behind the carnage. Something even more fluid and inexplicable than events in London.

These were the Phantom Riots.

Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger seem to have been the media of choice both for those gathering rioters and for more IT-aware police forces trying to calm situations. But they were also vehicles for misinformation – suddenly every township had rocks being thrown and Asdas on fire, every couple of teenagers in hoodies were a feral mob intent on bringing down civilisation. No evidence was offered for these events, but social media was sowing fear and confusion at a time when we could have done with less of this.

It’s not surprising though, because communities can have a tendency to jump at shadows. In this case the shadows were rampaging teenagers (which, it turns out, wasn’t quite the truth). Sometimes the shadows are, well, something else…

Take, for instance, The War of the Worlds. Everyone’s heard of how Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation triggered panics and fears of Martians invading America. However, this wasn’t confined to the US; in 1949, a Spanish-language version of the play lead to riots in Ecuador, with the same thing happening in Chile, 1944. Sometimes the enemy isn’t from Mars; last year there was panic on the streets of Georgia when a fake news broadcast indicated that Russia was repeating its 2008 invasion of the country. Blackberry Messenger may be the current medium demon for those wanting to blame the medium instead of the message, but it’s clear that TV and radio can also lead to panics – maybe what’s needed are better digital curation skills rather than kneejerk reactions.

Sometimes panics don’t arise because of fears of invasion – sometimes there are insidious forces lurking within communities waiting to strike. For two years, between 1788 and 1790, the women of London were terrorised by the London Monster, an attacker who would stalk his victims before stabbing them in the nose or buttocks. A man was arrested, but still people reported being attacked by the Monster, who seemed to have slipped into the cracks of urban mythology. Fifty years later, Spring-Heeled Jack began his reign of terror, a bogeyman stalking the rooftops of London and beyond, making appearences in my neck of the woods, at Himley and Old Hill in the West Midlands.

(This seems like a good point to link to an old post of mine, about the time in fifties Glasgow when the children went hunting the Gorbals Vampire.)

Then there are the times when people en masse just start acting strangely – uncontrollable dancing in 16th century Strasbourg, inexplicable laughter in Tanzania, 1962, and, well, witch-hunts in general. Given the almost unexplainable way the London riots took hold, spread across the country then stopped over the course of just a few days, you’ve got to wonder if an element of mass hysteria has been involved.

The riots seem to have calmed down, and Twitter is no longer jumping at its own shadow. There have been calls to ban Blackberry Messenger, as if this will stop rioters from communicating, as if BBM is some sort of totem that needs to be destroyed to prevent the corruption of the nation’s youth. This isn’t the case, but there are lessons to be learned from the way in which we have engaged with technology during the last few days, for while the instincts behind rumours and panics are nothing new, the speed at which they can be spread is now unprecedented. And yet, while we can talk darkly of exorcising phantoms, maybe the easiest way to deal with this is simple and threefold:

Stop.

Think.

Check.

Or, by it’s more traditional name:

Common Sense.

Writer’s Block: Stories of old

Who is your favorite mythical creature/character, and why?

Submitted By herasrevenge

Either Superman (who’s becoming something of a modern myth), John Henry (“Gonna run that hammer down!”), or the Pig on the Wall.

But while we’re talking about mythology, I’m going to shamelessly link to some old posts I did on the subject here, here, here, here, here, and here…

Some Welsh mythology for St. David’s day

Once upon a time there were two dragons, one red and one white, and they fought; the red dragon symbolising Wales, the white a representation of the invading Saxons…

Or maybe the dragon was just a flag, a banner, the standard carried by King Arthur as he rode into battle…

National stories are powerful, hence the dragon emblazoned on the Welsh flag. And it’s said that the last dragon in Wales still sleeps deep within Radnor Forest, four churches surrounding it and keeping it at bay, all of them dedicated to St. Michael (the Bible’s angelic slayer of dragons). The churches still stand, at Nant Melan, Cefnllys, Rhydithon and Cascob, still doing their duty.

Of course, I make no claim for there really being dragons in Wales, because we’re all very modern and don’t believe in such things, but then there’s this strange little story uncovered by author Mike Dash, perfect for St. David’s day, and just enough to make you ask “What if…?”

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.