Chapter 21

From the Garden to the Grail

By criticizing patriarchy or puerarchy, I do not want to deny spirituality, but only to show that it has been used in ways which hinder giftgiving. One of the reasons for our misunderstanding of giftgiving is that we see God as the greatest giver, and he is male. Thus, we mix giftgiving characteristics with the characteristics of masculation.

If we understood God, the giver, as female, perhaps we could come to consciousness of the paradigm more easily. Perhaps s/he is really pure altruism, a 'you-first' spirit, and that is why s/he is invisible. S/he creates things and loves them in a 'you-first' way and then goes on creating and loving others. If we cannot love each other, we block her movement. Perhaps nature spirits, fairies, and angels are only slightly less 'you-first' parts of the goddess.

Putting giving into the province of the male model hides the fact that women have already been doing it everywhere, all the time. Even the sacrifice of Christ's life distracts our attention from the amount of sacrifice that has been done everywhere by women for their children, husbands and others. Our gratitude is turned towards a male giver as the source, disguising the mother model.

I believe the most harmful aspect of Christianity is the glorification of sacrifice because it does not address the situations which make sacrifice necessary. The system which creates scarcity, war, environmental and human degradation must change, and this need should not be upstaged by the sacrifices of those who are making the best of the terrible situation. We must have the socio-political courage not to sacrifice ourselves, but to recognize the causes of the problems and unite with each other to change them, giving that general gift to all. If we can change the paradigm, which includes changing the reward system and the ego structure of exchange, we will be able to give without self-depletion. During the transition from one paradigm to the other, we have to create alternative organizations, use our energy, our imagination and our resources. We must decide whether to let ourselves be depleted or destroyed in the process, or to give up, or whether to try to maintain ourselves as models of givers who do not sacrifice.

In a situation of scarcity, it is all too easy to give to one's own depletion because giving is not generalized and, indeed, others may not give to the isolated giver. Women throughout history have been givers, because children's needs require itbut, trapped by the exchange paradigm, we are often crucified, made to give our lives in order to keep satisfying needs, because the situations we are in are so hostile that they murder us. Women are right, giving is the Way. But we have to generalize giving and change the context because, by doing it individually, we are destroyed.

Masculation and exchange put themselves forward, self-validate and call forth the gifts of others. Thus, those who are practicing giftgiving cannot see what they themselves are doing or give it dignity as the norm. They have accepted the ego-oriented values of others; so, paradoxically, they may not have the courage of their own other-oriented values and actions. Women may even believe that giving is wrong, though usually they do it anyway. They are afraid of the paradigm they are practicing and confuse the threat of self-sacrifice due to scarcity (a real danger coming from the social context) with the idea that giving creates the scarcity. Sacrifice for something may be a way of saving it from destruction, giving value to it, or a way of recognizing or naming it though 'paying for it.' On the other hand, sacrifice is often a product of domination by force.

Masculated Giving

The only thing we did wrong in the beginning was to shift from the gift to the exchange paradigm. Perhaps this is what the story of the Garden of Eden was all about. In the gift paradigm, no repayment is necessary. Only when we shift to the exchange paradigm do we find the necessity to repay. By treating the eating of the apple as a sin of disobedience, which required repayment, the Bible shows humans effectively entering into the exchange paradigm with God, casting Him into the role of punisher, providing 'just' reprisal. A God who was for giving, functioning according to the gift paradigm, would not have required repayment. S/he would have taught the children giftgiving by modeling it.

Perhaps Christ's self-sacrifice was an attempt to model giving and forgiving, but the Goddess (mother) model was canceled by the male model of the Father and the Son. (All those images of Madonna and Child could have shown to us that boys needed to follow their nurturing mothers. Instead, the other-orientation of the mother never became self-validating. We never took the logical step up. The focus was always on her 'other.') Thus the only appropriate place for giving seemed to be in motherhood to a male child. Moreover, women's values were not presented as such for social solutions, but were altered and translated through a male figure.

If Christ was a male model of giftgiving, the exchange paradigm was still the frame for interpretation, so he was seen as 'paying for' humanity's sins. His death 'evened the score,' but that could not get humanity out of the exchange paradigm. Even if he was paying in advance also, for the sins people were going to commit, exchange was still the issue. The exchange archetype underlies everything we do, and influences our consciousnesses to a great degree. Even when our spiritual intuition and our hearts draw us towards altruism, these patterns pull us and our interpretations of religion back to the masculated model. In fact, as we have been saying, our consciousness and the re-ality we live in are formed according to the values of masculation. Giftgiving--the female model--comes to consciousness filtered through masculation and exchange. Now feminism and the worldwide women's movement have allowed us to detach the mother from her 'other' and to see women as the bearers of the other-tending values of the species.

Communicating with the Gods

Humans have always tried to establish co-munication with the gods, giving them innumerable 'gifts' from animal sacrifice to human sacrifice, from novenas to tithes. The 'gift' of Christ's life to God can also be interpreted as an act of co-munication--the Word. Because we have not recognized the gift paradigm and its part in co-munication, we may see our attempt at interaction as a moment in the logic of exchange. We bribe the divinity: "I will give you this, if you give me that."

Perhaps because of our distress over masculation, or because of the ideology of exchange, or even because of a defect of imagination, we consider major sacrifices to be the kinds of gifts which would satisfy the needs of the gods. Maybe our difficulty in communicating is that those kinds of gifts distress the Divinity as much as they do ourselves. The scream of the sacrificial animal whose throat is being cut horrifies Her/Him--or Hum. We need to devise some other, kinder and easier gifts, such as words are for us, like incense, music, flowers and food. Our cruelty to each other makes a toxic atmosphere, where the spirit cannot flow freely from one person to the other.

Maybe our masculated attitudes simply do not allow for large enough collective units to form as a co-municating subject, who can hear and be heard by Hum. If we could really shift onto the gift paradigm, and disentangle the logic of communication from the logic of exchange, perhaps we could find again the garden of Eden. This could be God's or the Goddess's kingdom come. I don't think it will be a kingdom though, or even a democracy, but some new kind of government.

From Complex to Concept

In our Christmas celebrations, we put our joy at babies' being born, our desire for the best humans can be, our salvation, the solution to our problems. We see the solution to our problems in the child. In fact, this is one outcome of the gift paradigm/exchange paradigm struggle. The woman gives the child. The man gives the name, the inheritance. The child takes the place of the parents. The future is exchanged for the present, or takes its place, and the conflict is handed down, as the 'gift' from generation to generation. This heritage is a strange kind of gift, involving a contorted division of labor, like that between salaried husbands and unsalaried wives.

We exchange in the present in order to give to others in the future. In the future, will the others exchange or give? Now, at the end of the 20th century, we are taking both the present and the future into exchange. We are making the future a present to ourselves, and we are not handing down a good earth. We are creating scarcity, making the gift economy impossible for our children and future generations. We are validating the system, giving a meta judgment in favor of exchange, so the very possibility of giftgiving is destroyed.¹

The mother has been giving the gift of her children to her husband. The ancient right of primogeniture was one form taken by masculation in families of wealth and power. In the logic of Christianity, if Christ was God's son and also a man, and if men were brothers, Christ's one-many relation with them was like that of the first son to his brothers. The one-many relation of God the creator to mankind is equal to the one-many relation of Christ to mankind. In this, the relations are similar to one-many sample and one-many word.

Though the relation of artisan to products (which he made in his image) or father to children is a 'complex' of family resemblance, it can transform into a concept relation when the common quality of the items is discovered. The common quality of humans is expressed in their 'saved' souls, which are related to Christ as the one-many sample Christ is also equal to God in that relation, and is His incarnate word or re-presentative on earth.

Figure 39. God, Christ and the Word.

Figure 40. The concept formation process, Old and New Testament.

debt made people feel they should give to God (creating co-munication), which was gift-like motivation, but which was actually payment for a wrong. Maybe it seemed that by paying for the sin, there would be no more debt, and then the gift paradigm would return. However, it was not a sin humans committed, or a debt they incurred, or an act of not-giving they indulged in (not-giving obedience to God). It was just taking on the idea of paying back, exchange, that made humans appear to have to pay back. Unfortunately, as subsequent history demonstrated, Christ's 'payment' did not disqualify the exchange paradigm, even if he was 'for-giving.' Paying for humanity's sins was an exchange, even though the sacrifice of Christ's life was perhaps an attempt to show the giving model in a situation of scarcity of justice and real lack of kindness. Actually, many women sacrifice in similar situations all the time, not to pay for anything, but to satisfy the needs of those in their care. Perhaps being born from a Virgin shows Christ as the child of the gift paradigm, outside of genitalized sexuality, as well as beyond the male ego.2 Proposing giftgiving as coming from a male model is dangerous, however. Churches organized to honor Christ's teachings set up misogynist, masculated religious hierarchies, which supported political and economic hierarchies, invaded other territories and slaughtered people with other beliefs in order to teach them 'altruism.' To change paradigms, we must identify the gift paradigm with women generally, follow their leadership, and not repeat the masculated one-many structures which self-propagate, spawn hierarchies, and promote competition and domination. Indeed the over-valuing of the 'one' concept sample position is an important part of the problem. It is an element in the process of masculation, which must be dismantled in order to return to the gift paradigm as the norm. Unfortunately, both the logic and the organizational aspects of Christianity have merged the image of a giftgiving male god with the 'one' position and with the masculated characteristics of over-taking and domination.

Giftgiving on the social scale is being continually misread, while the gift mode on the individual internal scale is unseen. In fact, internal giftgiving does not just give a static picture, as we mentioned in regard to the homunculus. Internal giftgiving is often paralyzed and rendered unconscious, however, by the lack of validated models of giftgiving on the external. Perhaps the models of Christ's sacrifice and the sacrifice of religious saints do provide a context which, at least partly, validates giftgiving for the individual. However, by making giftgiving sacrificial and the gift paradigm saintly, instead of recognizing its existence in what women and many men are already doing in daily life, we push it out of everyone's reach.

The Authoritarian Father

Patriarchal religion provides a number of false images of the male giftgiver. The Father, who supposedly would not abuse his children, did actually send them out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple, and therefore, like human fathers, requires our blindness and denial towards his injustice. As a model of the giftgiver, internally and externally, Godliness leaves room for many transgressions, especially along the lines of authoritarianism. How many children have been abused in the name of the will of God, what violence performed upon them in the name of sanctity of their father and the necessity of filial piety? It is really wrong to call the God of these fathers 'good,' because compassion seems to be secondary to what they think of as right action--action which reinforces their masculated egos. Having projected their values onto an all-powerful Patriarch, men use him to justify their reinforcement of their egos, judging authoritarian ways as good.

When we question the presence of evil and suffering in the world, we are told it is beyond our knowledge. Actually, the authoritarian image of God validates abusive patterns in men, and does not validate women's nurturing and compassion--because it says that the male God, who is also authoritarian, is all good, and does not allow for a female image of God at all. This is part of the cause of the suffering. Thinking that we cannot understand it just feeds the denial of the abuse. We have a taboo on the thought that our concept of God might be causing masculated men to continue to create that suffering.

Similarly, mothers often refuse to see the abuse their husbands are perpetrating on their children, and have faith in his good side, and in 'God's unfathomable will.' This lets them allow the abuse and, in so doing, become party to it themselves as well. The image of the giftgiver is thus either assimilated into the image of the authoritarian masculated ego, or is feminine and powerless, nurturing the male, at best interceding with him like the Virgin Mary, humbly pleading the case of her child to the male Authority.

Meanwhile, the boy she is raising is really him, the male authority in miniature. So, our Mother within is transformed into little other-oriented initiatives within or into ineffective twinges of conscience tugging at the coat tails of our masculated will to power. We discount her intercession in favor of others as unrealistic compassion, quivers of a bleeding heart. If she succeeds in awakening some moment of other-orientation in us, credit is given to the Good Father, the 'beneficent' masculated ego. Perhaps we could cancel this illusory father image and have Mary as our model. We would have to change our image of her, redirecting her other-orientation away from obedience and intercession and towards the empowered nurturing of humanity and the planet--especially of women and children. Recently, in fact, the women's spirituality movement has restored to us many female images of the Divine, as giftgiving goddesses who are powerful as well.

The Holy Grail and Alchemy

The Holy Grail is the free source of abundance. The Grail, the cup, is symbolically also the cornucopia or womb. Perhaps the spiritual aspect to this story about the search by legendary heroes for the chalice of the Last Supper tells us again that the problem is not biological but social. The Grail is not a material thing but a logic, a way of organizing our economic behavior. The Grail is the gift paradigm. It is not a physical object--not womb, vagina, breast or penis, not horn nor sword, chalice nor blade--but a refusal to mis-align the microcosm and the macrocosm, a refusal to create the shift into the artificial structure of exchange and its ego, where abundance and nurturing should be. The Holy Grail is the gift that gives, the gift of the gift paradigm which we all receive from our mothers--we only have to overcome our childhood complexes and our masculated misunderstandings of language and life in order to be able to receive it at last.

This social interpretation of the Holy Grail can be supported by interpreting the practice of alchemy in Marxist terms. Any commodity could become the socially-chosen general equivalent, money, though gold is the one that actually did. Alchemy was really posing a question about a social choice. Transforming base metals into gold is the physical projection of the problem, "How does something become money?" This question harks back to the question, "How does a baby become male?" or, "How does a body part become a penis, the mark of the category 'male?'" or the even more hidden question, "How does a body part become a vagina, womb or breast, the producers of life and nurture?" and, "How might the womb or the breasts become the 'sample?'"

Both alchemy and the story of the Holy Grail show aspects of the social problem of masculation interpreted on a material plane. We have seen how the position of sample is socially attributed and is not a quality belonging to the material objects themselves. The special value of gold does not come from the metal itself; rather it is a social quality, coming from the use of gold as the general equivalent--the value sample--in exchange.

We could socially assign that role to specially designed pieces of lead, just as we have with printed paper. The relative scarcity of gold made it a functional means of exchange. That relative scarcity is also made possible by the special printing of paper money in limited quantities. We could just as easily print pieces of lead, though they would be harder to carry in our pockets. Ironically, if the alchemists had succeeded in transforming lead into gold, there might have been so much of it that gold could no longer have served as the general equivalent, and the purpose of the transformation would have been lost.

The transformation of base metals into gold has actually happened. The only element that has not entered into the process is the physical material identity of lead, and of gold. In the transformation, the physical identity of the items under transformation was actually irrelevant. What was essential was the similarity of items being used as money material to each other (as paper bills, coins, etc.) and their production in a limited quantity. This permitted their social use as general equivalent. The lead that was relevant, finally, was the printer's lead, used for printing paper money. The choice of gold or printed paper as general equivalent is due to many social and historical factors. The fact that we choose any object as a sample of economic value is due to masculation and its psycho-economic expression in exchange.

The search for the Holy Grail demonstrates a similar problem: it is a search for change at the wrong level. The physical object, the grail, is not the source of all abundance. Neither is the womb, as the symbolic equivalent of the cup. While the womb does bring up the idea of the mother, and the sought-for Grail the idea of a privileged object, the solution to the puzzle does not lie in finding that object or contemplating the womb, or in giving men a physical womb or castrating them in order to do so (or giving them a 'vagina' by wounding them). Nor is the answer the search itself.

Rather, the answer lies in changing planes from the physical, and metaphysical, to the social and psychological. By understanding and dismantling the social process of masculation, we can restore the mothering model for all, providing a nurturing economy (a social cornucopia), which will abundantly satisfy all needs. A nurturing economy would not require any changes in male or female physical bodies--no castration or adding on of organs where they originally were not. Only a change in our interpretations of these differences would be necessary, together with the dismantling of their psychological, economic and social projections. We have been forced to search for the source of all good because we were not asking the (right) question--the right question was not, "What ails the knight?" though it did bring up the issue of castration in its connection with the search for giftgiving. (In fact, that question is a lot like our greeting, "How are you?" which can potentially initiate a co-municative interaction.)

The question they and we should have been asking is something like, "How can we provide abundance for all?" to which the reply, then and now, would have been symbolically the Grail, "Follow the life-giving and nurturing mother model."³ The final question of Percival: "Whom does the grail serve?" is similar to the question, "Who is it for?" which is at the basis of the split between giftgiving and exchange. Is it for the other or for the ego, for the present or future Fisher King or for God? Or shall we apply to the Grail Marx's answer to the question of language and see its infinite creativity in the other-tending logic of human socialization, the logic that has the extra step: "For others, and therefore, really for me as well?"

In a recent book on the Holy Grail, Graham Phillips⁴ connects the medieval French Romance, La Folie Perceval with the Tarot and especially with the 'Popess' card (the figure of a woman in the papal one-many position). Phillips also makes a tentative identification of the Grail with the secret Gnostic Gospel of Thomas Didymus, a complete copy of which was purportedly discovered in Egypt in 1945. A section of the text he cites seems related to the mother model and liberation from masculation:

"Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom." They said to him, "Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom?" Jesus said to them, "When you make the two as one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female, when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom."

Several elements of this passage recall the restoration of the nurturing mother model, especially the unmasculated unity of male and female, and the breast model. The unity of opposites, and the return to substitution of things for things, are perhaps a transposition of material co-munication.

Male Nurturing

Transubstantiation through definition or naming, "This is my body. This is my blood," really proves the point of alchemy. God or Christ as the sample for the concept of mankind transforms the bread and wine into the sample (himself). As the sample nurturing man, he makes himself into food and drink.⁵ Transubstantiation demonstrates the power of definition, as masculation does. The effect of naming is not physical, as it would be in a miracle (as in changing water into wine), but social. The Holy Grail, the mother symbol, is the locus for making a nurturing male, by reinterpreting and reforming the social mechanism of naming, especially the naming of gender. Sub-stance is only under-standing.

Perhaps, in the sacrament of the church, more attention is given to the sample character in the transubstantiation process than to the material bread and wine character. From the material bread and wine, we only have to pass to the sample character of God, not to another physical material. And God is the "human form divine," a social idea, following the process of other social ideas, whether s/he exists as such or not.

'Transubstantiation' is a lot like exchange or masculation. It is a change in the status of something, which takes place by relating it to a new word as its name. The 'sample of samples' names (and points out) something as itself, and the priest repeats this process. If the male God is the general equivalent One, his making himself into food transforms both this matter into the sample and makes the male sample nurturing. Communion is, after all, only a taste, a sample. At the same time that bread and wine change into body and blood, the model shifts from male to female, from over-taking to nurturing--and this is really the taste of a better world, though it is hidden within the tabernacle of author-itarian patriarchal religion.

The symbolic form of the Grail coincides with its contents, transposing real into symbolic sacrifice, giving a gift that can easily be given (bread and wine) instead of a gift that cannot (body and blood). Male priests then potentially have something to give, by their words becoming more similar to nurturing women, modeling free giving. By their words, "This is my body, this is my blood," in the ritual, they presumably change the substance of the things, bread and wine. By changing our gender words, we could change the substance (under-standing) of males into nurturers. Communion points toward the ungendered hum-an, hidden within the model of the nurturing male.

What we need now is the restoration of the model of the nurturing female. Either model or both must serve to change the masculated system to which sacrifice is functional. With that change, we will create a system by which we will be able to share not symbolic but real food locally and globally, thereby transforming reality. We will understand words as the power of the collective to transform our understanding, and 'ones' as elements of our conceptual processes, liberating the spirit from patriarchy.

Human Sacrifice

At present, we are wasting wealth on things which do not satisfy our needs in order to stimulate the economy, and our gifts of value are therefore given not to each other but to the economy itself. Wasting and destroying products creates scarcity. High prices ensue because goods do not accumulate and thus do not create the abundance which would make the whole system unnecessary. Those who participate as sellers in the cycle of creating false artificial needs and waste receive greater profits in return for their efforts. Not only do they receive the gifts of the surplus value of the producers at home and abroad (and the issue of exchange-rate differential makes the whole economy of one country give to the whole economy and to the individual economic agents of another country), but they receive the gifts of the shadow of all the needs that remain unsatisfied because abundance has not been allowed to accrue.

'Trickle down' cannot happen because the cup which might have been the Grail is never allowed to fill up or to run over. The gifts run out as waste through a crack in the bottom. Meanwhile, the unsatisfied needs of millions of people, including the forty thousand children who die daily worldwide from hunger and preventable disease, are human sacrifices giving value to the 'needs' of the free market. The ritual human sacrifices that maintained the pyramidal society of the ancient Maya involved the slaughter of only a chosen few in view of all. Perhaps the Maya were, after all, both more compassionate and more conscious than we are.

We sacrifice millions of human lives to create the scarcity necessary for our system to function, to maintain the social pyramids, hierarchies, upward chains of gifts, and downward chains of masculated definitions and commands. But these sacrifices for many of us occur 'elsewhere.' The gifts which are given to us are invisible and, if they are seen at all, their interconnection with our economy is not acknowledged. Rebellions 'elsewhere' are quelled by the use of abundant armaments, the manufacture of which diverts energy and money into the means of destruction, and brings more profits to their producers and sellers, while depleting the store of the means of nurturing still further.

In the 'First World,' if we see the pictures of the starving and the maimed in other countries (or across the tracks), we attribute their condition to local calamities of nature or 'human nature.' However, because in an alternative system, in abundance, their situation would have been otherwise, their deaths, which are the consequence of artificially created scarcity and their excessive gifts to us, give value to our system by giving-way. Our own well-being seems to come from localized good fortune or 'deserving,' and we deny any transfer of wealth and value to us from other countries and classes.

The Mayan civilization ended; rituals of human sacrifice were no longer performed. Much speculation has been generated about the cause of its apparently abrupt end. Drought, disease, conquest have been suggested. I prefer to believe that someone finally changed her under-standing and said the sacred words, "This isn't working. Let's stop now." Then the whole group, in a great act of civilization, decided to go back to the countryside, to live peacefully with their loved ones, to give up attributing value to the pyramid by sacrificing and giving goods and obedience pyramidically. We can do the same.

The Maya originally sacrificed the 'one' as a gift in material co-munication with the gods, who would presumably give gifts of abundance in return. Blood was also let from the tongue (the word) and the penis (the 'mark' of the one position) of the king. As happened in many other cultures, the Maya sacrificed the privileged 'one' as the representative of the group.

Now we are sacrificing the lives of millions, not to gods, not as representatives, but to give value to a masculated system, which we perceive as nurturing us, our natural and only source of livelihood. The cultural value that we give to profit and wealth is also given by the sacrifice of the children and mothers of the future, since their means of nurturing are now being destroyed through environmental degradation. Cancer, due to nuclear radiation and hazardous chemicals, attacks the symbol and source of women's giftgiving, the breasts. In the US there is an epidemic. One in every eight women is expected to get breast cancer.

Actually, almost half of the population will have some kind of cancer. The disease also attacks the 'mark' of masculation in cancer of the prostate, and even the sperm count, especially in white men, has been drastically reduced in recent years, presumably by environmental causes. Because we do not challenge the incomplete accounts of cancer given by the free market apologists, such as the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Association, the sacrifice of our breasts, our capacity to reproduce, and our lives gives value to the exchange economy. The cancer-causing nuclear radiation and toxic chemicals that free market industries release into the environment remain invisible and continue to accumulate and become permanently abundant, while life-giving resources become scarce.

Those who are trying to heal the diseases receive their livelihoods from the system and give it their gratitude and credence, making it unlikely that they would consider it as the cause of the cancers. Like women who over-value masculation, they give value to the very processes that are causing the problem, while at the same time trying to care for the individuals who have been injured by those processes. The system is not just a beneficent, though sometimes harsh, husband, whom we must value and follow, doing damage control; it is a hazardous mechanism, which we must recognize, understand and dismantle step-by-step, so as not to destroy all those who live in and around it.

In so doing, we will change our consciousnesses and begin to attribute value, not to exchange, but to the needs of all and their satisfaction at all levels. We will stop sacrificing ourselves, our children and unknown billions of human beings to maintain our system of pyramids, and we will direct our gifts towards co-municating with everyone in abundance. We can begin to fashion the Holy Grail for society at large, the cornucopia of co-munication, by saying the holy words of tran-substantiation, changing our social under-standing: "Let's stop now."

¹Perhaps the "Star Wars" space shield was actually shielding exchange from giftgiving, doing this at meta (above) in space. The metaphor of meta was carried that far, with billions of dollars spent on it, because we just don't understand what we are doing.

²In fact, the relation between God, Mary and Joseph, and Jesus is reminiscent of the societies in which the mother's brother (a person who does not have sexual relations with the mother) takes over some paternal roles for the boy.

³The Grail (or cup of abundance) is the symbolic opposite of the 'cap' of cap-italism.

⁴ Dr. Graham Phillips, The Search for the Holy Grail, Arrow Books, Random House, London, 1996. pp.170-171. Dr. Graham Phillips also claims to have found the actual material artifact which was the Holy Grail.

⁵The Christian idea was not new. For example, in the tradition of the great goddess, the son-god Dionysus in his many forms was also ritually eaten. "As a Vegetation God he was ritually sacrificed, usually on a tree (prototype of the later crucifix). His flesh was eaten as bread, his blood drunk as wine..." from Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco, Harper and Row. 1987, p. 121.