Possible Tall Tales

The Holy Grail.

I’m sure you, like so many others, have heard of one legend or another concerning the Holy Grail. Whether the legend was from the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table or some other such story that had within it the legend of the powers that the Grail contained. There have been various stories of a variety of people finding the Holy Grail over the years and once it had fulfilled what the founder needed most disappearing once again until yet another quest was launched for it’s hiding place. Rumors of what the Grail looks like and that if had been found again have always been rampant, but does anyone really know if they’ve actually found it again? Does anyone really even know what it looks like or where it is?

Over the years there have been many debates on all of these various things concerning the Holy Grail, as well as on several other relics. Which brings me to the Prophet Muhammad’s hair in the novel East, West by Salman Rushdie. In this story the moneylender, Hashim, finds a single strand of human hair in “a cylinder of tinted glass” (p. 42) and just “knew” it was the famous relic floating in the water of the quay. But instead of returning the sacred hair within the vile, Hashim decides that he will perform a fine service by not returning the relic to it’s shrine to be worshiped, as the prophet abhorred, which was the moneylender’s “duty as a citizen” (p. 43).

However, like a lot of stories concerning powerful, ancient and sacred relics, Hashim’s story has a bad turning point when he keeps the vile with the sacred hair. For after he sits with the vile among his vast collections for long hours he “began to gush, to spume long streams of awful truths” (p. 45) to his family leaving devastation in his wake. And that was only the beginning! The next morning Hashim got his family up at five o’clock to begin their prayers for the first out of five prayers for the day, burned the majority of not all of the books but the Qur’an and told “his family to read passages from [that] book for at least two hours per day” (p. 47). When Hashim’s wife went to try to calm him down he hit her and then hit his son Atta for going to his mother’s defense and said, “From now on there’s going to be some discipline around here!” (p. 48)

You have to wonder if all supposed sacred relics could cause such horrible outcomes and give the current possessor such an underlying drive of greed as Hashim the moneylender seemed to have. His story makes you wonder not only was the hair the genuine article or something else altogether, and whether or not any relic could have similar effects on any potential possessors, including relics like the Holy Grail. With this in mind, doesn’t this make you wonder if finding the Grail could be such a good thing? Does it really even exist and if it does, does it have the power so many people say it possesses?