This book is about the Holy Grail, but the Holy Grail not as a cup, a chalice - as a person; not as the "San Graal" but as the "Sang Raal", the Blood Royal, and in it we follow this Blood Royal from earliest times through the not-so-Dark Ages (as Margaret Starbird points out, "people who lived in this period did not call it 'dark'") to the time of the troubadours, Cathars and Templars, the world of the Occitan (Provence) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and up the renaissance in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
It starts with a fictional account of the birth of a child to Mary Magdalen in Egypt, where Joseph of Arimathea has taken Mary (here called Miriam) for her protection following the execution of Jesus. As Jesus' widow and the mother of his son, she - and the baby - Joseph believes, will be in as great danger as Jesus himself had been. For this is the child expected by the Jewish nationalists, the boy who will be their leader and "messiah".
But - after a long and difficult birth during which both mother and child almost die - it is a girl!
'Your child, Miriam. Your baby lives,' the midwife announced, jubilant after the long, desperate hours. 'A beautiful baby. A daughter.'
Shock and disbelief slapped Miriam across the face. It can't be, she thought. What about the promises, the prophecies? There must be some mistake. It cannot be a daughter. The Son of David, the Scepter of Israel, cannot be a girl! In her exhaustion and confusion, she lapsed into inconsciousness.
Obviously men's plans were not as God's plans.
In order to ensure their safety, Joseph of Arimathea finally decides that he must take Mary and her daughter, now called Sarah, far, far away, to the south coast of France, and that is where the rest of this story takes place.
The author guides us through the early legends (Joseph of Arimathea, Lazarus, Martha and the Marys, Saint Sarah the Egyptian), through the labyrinth of Merovingian claims, de Bouillon and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Templars, the Cathars, the jongleurs and troubadours, the Tarot (seen as symbols of the Grail heresy), and the often covertly, sometimes overtly, heretical paintings of medieval artists like Simone Martini and renaissance artists like Botticelli (the latter himself apparently Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, clandestine successors of the Knights Templar, from 1485 to 1510).
With the huge success of the rather overrated Da Vinci Code (but we are biased, we like our novels medieval!) the concept of a Holy Family coming down through the ages, and its connection with the Templars and the Priory of Sion, is becoming widely known. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is by far the best book I have come across on what all the fuss is about.
Also highly recommended is the same author's The Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail, in which she goes into much greater detail on each of the trump-cards of the Major Arcana and its Cathar roots than was possible in the first, more general, book. (Those of you who have read my Thirteen-Card Spread will already know of my interest in the tarot.)
JM
