Faking the Grail
Development
According to the legends, the Holy Grail was a chalice, which was used at the Last Supper, a large dish or charger, ditto, or a jewel which fell from Lucifer's crown, which may or may not have been the philosophers' stone.
A brief trawl through the available facts suggested that metal, precious stones and/or glass were the traditional materials for most of the objects that have been mistaken for the genuine article in their day.
A green glass charger from Caesarea, which was believed to be the Grail, has been in Genoa Cathedral since the beginning of the twelfth century.
A stone cup set in an elaborate gold mount decorated with pearls, rubies and emeralds, which was believed to have been used by Saint Peter, has been in Valencia Cathedral since 1437.
A lot of large green gemstones were brought back to Europe from the Holy Land by the crusaders and ended up in various shrines, including Cologne Cathedral and the Vatican, but I was unlikely to be able to get my hands on one of them, regardless of the budget. Known as crusaders' emeralds, they came from an island in the Red Sea, which has been mined since antiquity and used to be called Topazos by the Greeks.
Topazos provided Cleopatra with some of her most spectacular jewels, which were known as evening emeralds by the
Romans. During the Middle Ages the island was called St John's. These days it's called Zebargad.
The gemstone we call topaz today was known in antiquity as the Gem of the Setting Sun, which had the golden glow of the mighty sun god Ra according to the Egyptians. The Romans associated it with Jupiter.
The gemstone from Zebargad, which was called topazion by the Greeks, comes in various shades from a rich green to pale greenish yellow and was known as the Gem of the Morning. The correct name for the paler stones is chrysolite, which means "golden stone" in Greek. The green ones are now known as peridots.
Known collectively as olivine, peridot and chrysolite are softer than emerald and topaz and far less brittle,
which makes them much easier to cut. Carved into beads by Egyptians and engraved as intaglios for signet rings by Greeks and Romans, they are amongst the oldest known gemstones.
Peridots in particular were considered very desirable until they were eclipsed by the exceptionally good quality emeralds the Spanish conquistadors brought back from Mexico, which came on to the market just in time for the Renaissance.
Considered sacred in Hawaii, peridots, which are thrown up by volcanoes, are described as the tears of the Goddess Pele, who may have been mourning the son of the morning, as Aphrodite did for Adonis, long before Lucifer was mentioned in the cradle of civilization. Aphrodite, and Ishtar and Isis before her, were all called "queen of the heavens", which was understood at the time to be a reference to Venus, the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.
Like Zebargad, the sand on some Hawaiian beaches is almost pure olivine, which has been used as a flux to make steel since the iron age. I doubt very much that gem quality topazion was the only thing on the island in the Red Sea that interested the Greeks or the Egyptians before them or the Romans and the crusaders later on.
Peridot is also, funnily enough, the only extra-terrestrial gem quality crystal that has ever been found in a meteorite. Diamonds were also believed to be extra-terrestrial once, formed in thunder and lightning and hurled to earth by the gods. So were several other stones with also occur as octahedrons.
Iron artefacts were being made out metal from nickel-iron meteorites during the bronze age. Minute diamonds have been found in them but they are far too tiny to see. I added a nickel-iron meteorite to my notes, which were beginning to look quite interesting.
Copyright©2005 Alex Murray.