Nicolas Cage and the Holy Grail

Apparently, Nicolas Cage doesn’t just hunt for lost treasures in the movies — and that includes the Holy Grail.

In the 2004 adventure film National Treasure, Cage plays an amateur historian who goes on a wild hunt for clues to a legendary treasure, leading him from the Knights Templar to Freemasons to a coded map on the Declaration of Independence.

According to a new interview in the New York Times Magazine (also quoted in the Hollywood Reporter, if you have paywall issues), in real life, Cage has owned cobras, spent $276,000 on a dinosaur skull (he had to give it back to Mongolia — no refund, sorry), and went on a hunt for the literal Holy Grail.

In various legends, the Grail is either the cup Christ used at the Last Supper, and/or the cup that caught His blood at the Crucifixion. It was prominent in many medieval and later romantic tales, most notably those of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Some Spanish historians also claimed to have found it, but the jury’s still out on that one.

The Church has no official stance on the existence of a Holy Grail, whatever you think it is. From the Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent:

The name of a legendary sacred vessel, variously identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Pascal lamb, and the theme of a famous medieval cycle of romance. In the romances the conception of the Grail varies considerably; its nature is often but vaguely indicated, and, in the case of Chrestien’s Perceval poem, it is left wholly unexplained.

…

A word as to the attitude of the Church towards the legend. It would seem that a legend so distinctively Christian would find favour with the Church. Yet this was not the case. Excepting Helinandus, clerical writers do not mention the Grail, and the Church ignored the legend completely. After all, the legend contained the elements of which the Church could not approve. Its sources are in apocryphal, not in canonical, scripture, and the claims of sanctity made for the Grail were refuted by their very extravagance.

Moreover, the legend claimed for the Church in Britain an origin well nigh as illustrious as that of the Church of Rome, and independent of Rome. It was thus calculated to encourage and to foster any separatist tendencies that might exist in Britain. As we have seen, the whole tradition concerning the Grail is of late origin and on many points at variance with historical truth.

The Grail has also been the McGuffin (a movie term for an object that everybody in a story wants) in several movies and TV shows.

The funniest has to be 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

And then there’s 1981’s Excalibur, which is an almost wholly pagan take on Arthur (but the horses and costumes are really nice):

Surprisingly, one of the most reverent is 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which the Grail is indeed identified as the Cup of Christ and has healing powers (it also bestows immortality, but only in a very limited geographic range).

https://youtu.be/lEoekLxssI0

One of the dumbest is History’s series Knightfall, a soapy and dopey take on the Knights Templar, who, in season one (after much sex and violence) find the Grail in a box hanging from a tree — or something like that. I’ve been trying hard to forget. No, I’m not posting a clip from that one.

Anyway, Cage — who was (kind of) raised in a Catholic family but has spiritually wandered far off — did a lot of reading and decided to check out some Grail legends.

From the New York Magazine interview (questions in bold):

For me it was all about where was the grail? Was it here? Was it there? Is it at Glastonbury? Does it exist?

Oh, O.K. I thought you were being metaphorical about going on a grail quest. Yeah, if you go to Glastonbury and go to the Chalice Well, there’s a spring that does taste like blood.

I guess it’s really because there’s a lot of iron in the water. But legend had it that in that place was a grail chalice, or two cruets rather, one of blood and one of sweat. But that led to there being talk that people had come to Rhode Island, and they were looking for something as well.

…

But yes, this had put me on a search around different areas, mostly in England, but also some places in the States. What I ultimately found is: What is the Grail but Earth itself?

I find that grail quests tend to be more fulfilling when they’re metaphorical. Well, I knew that, and the metaphor for me is the earth. The divine object is Earth.

Well, OK, then.

Image: Shutterstock

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