Shakespeare's Holy Grail:

Cutting Off the Tree of Life

It’s now as if Shakespeare is using Macbeth’s voice to tell us how the Tree of Life was cut off in Genesis and simultaneously foreshadow its reopening in the Revelation.

Remember how, in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the core premise of both this research and the novel based on it, The Da Vinci Code, was that the term ‘Holy Grail’ derives from the Old French sang graal meaning ‘royal blood’?

Immediately after he has committed the murder most foul, Macbeth laments to Malcolm and Donalbain, the sons and heirs of the dead Duncan, that the royal blood that flows from their father (God, the fountain, the source) has been cut off. Macbeth is torn between feigning innocence and suffering the visceral effects of shock at the inner consequences of what he has just done. In verse, deliciously invoking both the wine and the blood of the Eucharist, in consecutive lines, he’s again using, as a metaphor for something even higher than just any earthly king, ‘Royal Father’. Is this yet another allusion to the Last Supper and also the Father in Heaven?

 Here’s what Macbeth tells the sons of the king he just murdered. Even though he feigns innocence, he is nevertheless apoplectic over what he has done and how he now feels.

MACBETH

Renown and Grace is dead,

the wine of life is drawn

The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is stopped

The very source of it is stopped…’

…Your Royal Father’s murdered.

Macbeth, Act II Scene III

In the first of two hair’s-breadth-close allusions to the word Grail (sang graal), is Shakespeare using his verse to evoke a deep, subliminal sense of a momentous event in the past of all of us — an event that cut off the very source of our life blood, the energy vibration through which everything was created: the Tree of Life, the Word of God Himself? It is an event deep in the story of our spiritual evolution that rendered us blind and deaf in the beginning, and blinds and deafens us, to this day, to the songs of the soul and the ultimate truth of who we really are.

Note also the resonance this verse has with the idea of the Grail as the sang graal, the Royal Blood, and his confirmatory allusion to ‘the wine of life’ — the very symbol introduced by Jesus himself at the Last Supper. Intone the resonance of Macbeth’s reference to the ‘fountain of your blood’ with a passage from Revelation Shakespeare plunders over and over again.

And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.

Revelation 21:6