Devils

Devils are the deceptive adversaries who seek to divert knights from the spiritual purpose of the Holy Grail Quest. In the account of Sir Bors, they exploit compassion, fear of dishonour, and apparent religious authority: they present a beautiful woman and her attendants as sufferers in need, then disguise deception as moral counsel. Their defeat depends not on strength of arms but on Bors’s refusal to abandon chastity and on the abbot’s interpretation of what he has witnessed.

Nature and Place in the Grail Story

The Grail tradition gives the Devils’ opposition a distinctly Christian frame. The introductory account identifies the Sangreal with the vessel associated with the Last Supper and the blood of Jesus Christ, brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea. In the quest narrative, the sacred vessel is also a sign of spiritual sustenance and revelation. Against that order of holiness, the Devils seek to obstruct a knight’s progress by making false appearances seem credible and morally compelling.

The wider Grail narrative repeatedly joins visible marvels to spiritual meaning. At the Pentecost feast, the Holy Grail passes through the hall unseen by the knights, while each receives the food and drink he most desires. Later, in a vision before Galahad and his companions, Joseph of Arimathea appears with angels, a bleeding spear, and the vessel; the scene culminates in a revelation of Christ and the knights’ reception of the sacred food. These episodes establish the contrast within which the Devils’ deception operates: sacred signs lead toward spiritual understanding, while fiendish imitations confuse appearances and threaten to turn a knight away from the quest.

The Temptation of Sir Bors

The test of Bors begins with a dream that a priest interprets as a warning. A beautiful and wealthy woman, the priest says, loves Bors and may die if he refuses her; at the same time, Bors’s brother Lionel and his cousin Sir Launcelot are placed in the balance against the woman’s honour. The interpretation presses Bors toward a false choice: surrender his chastity to avert apparent suffering, or risk being blamed for the death of people close to him.

The temptation takes bodily form in a high tower, where a richly dressed woman asks Bors to become her lover and promises him great wealth. When he refuses, she appears to despair and goes up to the battlements with twelve gentlewomen. One of them calls on him to yield, claiming that they will otherwise die and that ladies will condemn him. The appeal turns his compassion into leverage: refusal is presented not as fidelity to his religious commitment but as a cause of others’ deaths and his own dishonour.

Bors does not yield. The women fall from the tower, and he is left astonished; he blesses himself, after which the tower, the women, and even the chapel where he had brought his brother disappear. A great noise follows, and Bors recognizes that he has escaped a grave spiritual danger. He rides on and reaches an abbey, where he tells the abbot what happened. The sequence exposes the episode’s governing method: a fabricated scene makes a sinful choice appear merciful, while religious-looking surroundings lend the false appeal authority.

Disguise, False Counsel, and the Dream’s Meaning

The abbot explains that the apparent religious adviser who had criticized Bors was a Devil in the likeness of a man of religion. The disguise was calculated to exploit Bors’s tenderness of heart and turn him toward error, false hope, and lust. The vision of the slain brother was also false: Lionel was still alive. By misrepresenting the consequences of Bors’s earlier choice, the Devil sought to make him abandon the quest rather than trust the spiritual meaning of his actions.

The abbot’s reading also distinguishes the temptations from the genuine duties of knighthood. The woman for whom Bors fought signifies the new law of Jesus Christ and the Church; her opponent signifies the old law and the Devil warring against the Church. The abbot calls Bors’s battle right because a knight serving Christ should defend the Church. In this interpretation, the Devils do not simply oppose Bors in combat. They try to make him misread what his combat and compassion mean.

The dream’s birds and flowers extend that lesson. The abbot identifies the black bird with the Church and the white bird with the Devil, while the swan—white outwardly but black within—stands for hypocrisy: an appearance of religious service concealing sin. The threatened women who fell from the tower were Devils, and the third bird in the dream signified the struggle against those apparently beautiful ladies. The symbols are therefore not free-floating riddles: the abbot connects each one to the deception Bors has just endured and to the spiritual danger of trusting outward appearance.

Moral Stakes and Narrative Function

The episode sets Bors’s response against the apparent failure of his brother Lionel. The abbot describes Lionel as lacking virtue and acting contrary to the order of knighthood, while judging Bors right to rescue the women who were in danger of dishonour. He argues that Bors would have risked grave harm by abandoning them in order to aid the brother represented by the rotten tree in the dream. The dilemma is not resolved by placing family loyalty and compassion in a simple hierarchy; instead, the interpretation distinguishes a true act of protection from the Devil’s manufactured demand that Bors betray his vows.

The Devils’ most effective weapons are therefore moral confusion and counterfeit signs. They make lust look like mercy, a false adviser resemble a religious man, and an invented death seem like evidence of Bors’s guilt. The abbot’s account restores the distinctions that the vision blurred, relating Bors’s actions to the Church, the Grail, and the knight’s spiritual obligations. The episode gives the quest a test of discernment alongside its physical adventures: progress depends not only on courage but also on resisting deceptive appearances and understanding what a choice serves.