"You can never know if this chalice was in the hands of Jesus Christ, but it does have all the characteristics." This is how the canon of the cathedral of Valencia, Jaime Sancho, responds when asked about the authenticity of the grail that treasures the temple. Characteristics that have now been reinforced by the conclusions of the study prepared by the Professor of Design of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Gabriel Songel. In his book The revealed chalice (Tirant editorial), which was presented this morning at the seo, Songel advances 300 years, until the eleventh century, the first reference in a document to the Valencian Holy Chalice and corroborates data that makes "more plausible" May this be "the authentic" Holy Grail.
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The search for the chalice generated a fruitful literary tradition in the Middle Ages. The poet Chrétien de Troyes mentions it in the 12th century in his Perceval narrative . The well-known Arthurian cycle combined the Christian tradition with ancient Celtic myths referring to a divine cauldron. The legends became part of the collective imagination of the West and today continue to feed from video games to movies, through historical novels.
Songel has adhered to the analysis of the elements that make up the chalice. He assures that the first documented mention is the one located in an acrostic in the manuscript, from the end of the 11th century, which contains the reliquary of the monastery of San Juan de la Peña (Huesca). He emphasizes that at the base of the grail an inscription in Arabic writing was found in the sixties, which at that time was translated as "the shining one." "The fact of having used a circular design pattern led us to raise the hypothesis that it could be a specular writing," says the researcher, who has spent six years studying it. "Indeed, the inverse image could be interpreted as Hebrew, meaning" Yaveh Joshua "(God the savior, Jesus is God)." "The author should therefore be knowledgeable of Hebrew and Arabic and with access to the chalice, the monks of San Juan de la Peña and the Aragonese kings," he adds.
This historic monastery of Huesca housed in the 11th century the agate glass, dated around the first century of our era. The holy chalice would have left Rome to Hispania in the third century in the fear of Pope Sixtus II for the persecution of the Romans, according to the Aragonese and Valencian Christian tradition. The Pope entrusted it to his young deacon Lorenzo, originally from Huesca, who took him to his homeland. There is a whole oral tradition about the deed. From there, finally, King Alfonso the Magnanimous moved him in the fifteenth century to Valencia, then one of the most flourishing cities in the Mediterranean and the Old Crown of Aragon.
Interdisciplinary research, "from design, numismatics, paleography and codicology" shows that this chalice was already a relic venerated in the eleventh century "and protected before the phenomenon of the exhibition and ostentation of the relics of the fourteenth century." The study provides as "historical and artistic data" that the object was already composed as we know it today and that it was assembled before the fourteenth century. The grail is composed of two parts: the vessel, seven centimeters high and 9.5 centimeters in diameter; and a foot with handles that would have been added later.
"What is clear and has not been refuted until now is that the top cup of the chalice of Valencia is an agate that is only generated in Palestine - near Alexandria - and that" is carved in a very special way around the century I of our time, "says Sancho. Throughout history up to ten grails have been identified as authentic. There are relics in Leon, Genoa, Dublin and even at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Sancho ensures that those other chalices" they have been falling because they have not passed the archaeological filter, they were very later, they had another purpose, "they were made of other material or they did not have oral tradition." It happens that others do not have that oral tradition. No one had talked about it. The most talked about in history is that of Valencia. Therefore, I think it gives more credibility, "he says.
Songel explains that his research has led to "surprising" findings, the first "checking that the composition of the chalice as we know it today was done following a design pattern that was already known" and that corresponds to the one used to make "the marks of stonecutter ", the inscriptions that these professionals made on the stones that carved for the medieval constructions. The professor indicates that the coincidence of the proportions of the calyx with the key points of the pattern suggest that the use of compositional reticles in its design was not a coincidence. The "tiny" inscription on the base of this piece also corresponds to a design pattern.
The findings also include "the coincidence of the coin minted by the Aragonese king Sancho Ramírez with the structure of the chalice," using "the psalm of the trunk of Jesse referring to the coming of a messiah and a new dynasty" , adds the scholar. The Tirant Lo Blanch publishing house publishes Songel's book in its Plural Humanities collection, although it is one of the most important legal stamps in Spain.
In addition, the revealed chalice is also configured as "the catalog" of the traveling exhibition that will start in June and that drives the Generalitat through Turisme to tour the municipalities that are part of the Grail route, as the coordinator of the Route of the Grail-Tourism Community, Fina Doménech.