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Among the Pilgrims: Journeys to Santiago de Compostela

by Mary Victoria Wallis

431 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1164; ISBN 1-4120-0796-8; US$34.00, C$39.95, EUR28.00, £19.50

Weaves accounts of bicycle and walking pilgramages to Santiago de Compostela together with the thousand-year old history of the Camino de Santiago. Compares modern pilgrimage with medieval religious traditions.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts or Table of Contents      catalogue info

About the Book Mary Victoria Wallis's Among the Pilgrims is the story of her two pilgrimages - one by bicycle in 1997 and one on foot in 1998 - in northern Spain along the thousand year old route to the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela. In ten chapters covering everything from medieval miracle tales to the modern perils of shin splints and flat tires, she gives her view, as a medievalist, outdoor enthusiast, and inquiring pilgrim with Buddhist leanings, of the five hundred mile trail to Santiago. Among the Pilgrims takes the reader through a landscape of both the past and the present, the real and the imagined, through a topography not only of village and field, but of mind and spirit as well. In the cultural remains of medieval pilgrimage, Mary searches for the spiritual seeds of modern pilgrimage. Using a personal and impressionistic style, Among the Pilgrims brings into relief the treasury of literature, art, architecture, music, philosophy and science that was born and transmitted along the Camino de Santiago. Early in her first trip, for instance, Mary climbs the pass over the Pyrenees into the Spanish town of Roncesvalles. Here, in 779 AD, Count Roland was slain, blowing a dying note upon his magical oliphant to summon help from King Charlemagne - thereby giving birth to Le Chanson de Roland - and French literature. On the dry plains of northern Castile, she discovers the cradle of many Western musical traditions. Further west, she comes upon a 12th-century Templars castle that Napoleon thought about blowing up only two hundred years ago. Far from being isolated cultural artifacts, these stories, places and treasures are part of a heritage reaching into our own time. They are also mirrors in which we can find ourselves. In the Middle Ages, the pilgrim's destination at Santiago was, after Jerusalem and Rome, the third most important in Christian Europe. Eight centuries later, when Napoleon's armies ravaged Spain during the Peninsular Wars, the pilgrimage died out almost completely. Among the Pilgrims reflects on the rise and fall of the Camino, from its glorious beginnings with the Spanish Reconquista, to its decline during the Renaissance and Reformation, its near death in the wars of the 19th Century, and its odd echoes that have since reverberated as far west as Mexico and Peru. Among the Pilgrims is also about the resurgence of the Camino and the pilgrim's spirit. In the 1960s, the number of travellers on the road to Santiago began to grow; by the year 2000, the tiny hamlets along the way were seeing thousands of pilgrims each summer: walkers, cyclists, even a few horseback riders. The rise of the environmental movement, along with eco- and cultural tourism, are in some ways modern expressions of the urge to pilgrimage. Many travellers seek a transcendent meaning, a new - or perhaps an ancient - sacredness in nature. In Among the Pilgrims, Mary looks at the idea of pilgrimage through her own and other's experiences on the Camino. She asks how our response to the route is informed by what we know of its past, and also by our own personal pasts. She asks too what contemporary meaning - if any - an old Christian trail has in a world where the forces of organized religion are being dispersed into personal quests for spiritual harmony and fulfillment. Among the Pilgrims explores how people today experience the Camino and how an important tradition in western civilization - the Christian pilgrimage - is being transformed in a secular world trying to renew its experience of place.

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About the Author Mary Victoria Wallis has a PhD in English Literature, and a Master of Health Science. She has been a university professor and teacher for nurses, medical students, literature students, and health care professionals, and has conducted workshops on communication and spirituality in the care of the sick and dying. Nowadays, she earns her daily bread in Hospice and Palliative Care, where she combines her interest in the scientific and clinical with an inquiry into experiences of people at the far end of their lives. She maintains a keen interest in English literature, medieval European culture, and the spiritual traditions of both East and the West. She is a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation. Mary is an avid canoeist, touring and backcountry cyclist, sea kayaker and hiker. She has travelled throughout Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, and has lived and worked in Nigeria and Uruguay. She is Canadian and lives as a "resident alien" - something akin to a pilgrim - in the United States.

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Sample Excerpts and Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.........vi
Pilgrimage................3
The Time Before..........41
Moors....................91
Stories.................141
Landscapes..............185
Churches................227
A Fallen World..........259
The Wheel of Fortune....295
Songs...................343
Santiago................381
Notes...................420

from Mary Victoria Wallis's Among the Pilgrims: Journeys to Santiago de Compostela.

Chapter One. Pilgrimage. pp. 6-10

The pilgrimage trail known since the Middle Ages as El Camino de Santiago makes a shallow loop across northern Spain like the chipped edge of an antique dish. As are all antiques, it is a compromise of materials and illusion: part earth and asphalt, part story. It comes out of southern France, a little road that climbs up over windy passes in the Pyrenees, then slips down the south slopes onto the farmlands of Spanish Navarra. At Puente la Reina, the Camino turns west, more trail than road now, to cross La Rioja and the high, horizonless Castilian plateau. At Burgos, it bears slightly north; after León, it rises and drops over two thin spurs of the Cantabrian Mountains, then all but disappears into the eucalyptus forests of Galicia. Days later, less than twenty miles from the Atlantic Ocean, the trail from France makes its way up onto the broad crest of Monte de Gozo, the Mount of Joy. Below, shining in the sunset or, more often, glistening in the rain, are the steeples of the old city of Santiago de Compostela.

Santiago is an heirloom in granite. Like the trail that leads to it, it is built as much of legends and lies as of earth and stone. Even the weather is an accomplice in the artifice: mists drift like souls along the walls of buildings; raindrops dance on sunbeams among church spires. The dark, rectangular paving stones of the main square, the enormous Plaza Obradorio, hold the reflection of lowering clouds like the image of a dream.

On the east side of the Plaza, a Baroque staircase rises like a follies stage set to the doors of Santiago Cathedral. High above, in the nooks of the church's grand façade, winged statues pose triumphantly. Each one proclaims the Camino's illusion: here, in this Galician city at the end of the road from France, lie the bones of St. James the Great, friend of Jesus, missionary apostle, Spain's patron saint, and hero of the Reconquista.

James, whom Jesus nicknamed a Son of Thunder, died in Jerusalem in 44 AD, beheaded. After this gruesome death, say the legends, his body was gathered up by a few disciples and taken to Spain in a stone boat. He was buried in Galicia, in a tomb mostly forgotten until a local bishop discovered it again in the 9th Century. In the centuries since that crucial find, people have come to Santiago from all over to worship at James' shrine. During the golden Camino years between 1050 and 1200, pilgrims made their way through the streets of Santiago by the thousands. They crowded in thick streams through the doors of the cathedral to kneel, smelly and fervent, beneath its incense-inflated arches. Their prayers fluttered toward the saint like the outstretched hands of the starving, as they begged, in an age that awaited miracles the way we hope for an overdue telephone call, for a cure, a son, an end to famine and strife. At the very least, they sought solace for their burdened souls and a promise of paradise to take home to their faraway villages.

After the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, the great medieval pilgrimage drifted into the margins of history. But there were always a few people every year who went to Santiago, even after Napoleon's army had wrecked nearly everything along the route. And in the 1960s, with the blessing of Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Camino began a dubious reincarnation as a modern pilgrimage trail. In 1987, it was declared the first European Cultural Route by the Council of Europe. Today, it is Europe's longest and most authentic historical itinerary, a designation that rankles those who feel that history and culture are for tourists, and that tourists are not pilgrims.

One spring in the late 1990s, I bicycled El Camino from the Pyrenees to Santiago - some eight hundred kilometers - in a little over two weeks. In August of the next year, I crossed it on foot in about a month. Those journeys now seem more like orbits than separate trips from one side of Spain to the other. Over two seasons, I passed through the same towns, the same landscapes, even drank from the same fountains. But as if my path had become an inward spiral, I saw all of these the second time from a new perspective, at an altered speed and with a different emotional frequency. The weather was spring fresh the year I bicycled and summer hot the year I walked. The clouds, fat with rain the first time, had thinned away to nothing the second; and the green fields of May were, in August, a wispy yellow, dry almost to disappearing. As for me, I went from being restless one year to something approaching contemplative the next.

Over two seasons, I fell in with a long line of other Camino travellers: cycling pilgrims, walking pilgrims, bus, car and motorcycle pilgrims, and many people who weren't pilgrims at all. Our days revolved around the Camino of the past. Crossing the threshold of medieval churches, resting beside ancient waymarks, simply by being where so many others had walked over the centuries, we became part of the old pilgrimage ourselves. We tried, sometimes awkwardly, to pay homage to the pilgrims of an old, outlandish-sounding faith; inevitably, we were kept aloof in the present by the centrifugal pull of time.

We were also travelling, I found, on the hopes and nameless dreads of our own times, enacting a peculiarly modern Camino history. In a 1993 book about the pilgrimage, I came across the statement of an eighteen-year-old boy: "Now no one can say I am worthless," he wrote. "I have done the Camino de Santiago." Like the Camino itself, my trips extended beyond the road into the world of words. I wrote about the Camino before I left home, piecing together some intentions for the journey. I wrote while I was on the road, scratching notes and questions in my diary over chunks of bread and cheese, or curled beneath a shaky light in a pilgrims' refugio. Back home in Canada, I kept writing, trying to see past the prism of nostalgia to what the Camino really had to tell a skeptical age. I wondered whether I, or anyone today, had an authentic role to play in the stories and evolution of a medieval road leading to a dubious reliquary in Galicia. I was a medievalist by training, somewhat metaphysical by nature. But I earned my living in the health sciences, and the pragmatic, research-trained part of me was also drawn to the story of Santiago. I probed beyond the Camino of the coffee books, lovely as it is, for its hidden histories, its contradictions and fakery, and I wrestled with a hydra of a question: what is the spiritual traveller from a world of irony and iconoclasm to do with a medieval Christian pilgrimage route?

The Camino is history alive. It lures you, captures you in its tangled stories. A few cities with familiar names are located along the path - Pamplona, Burgos, León - places that were busy with trade and the affairs of church and state when the pilgrimage was at its peak in the Middle Ages. The cities have monasteries, museums, civic buildings, the tombs of Queen Eleanor, El Cid, St. Isidore. You are pulled into their cathedrals like a bee into a flower.

Between the cities are dozens of low-slung towns and wispy villages where you can fill your water bottle at an ancient fountain and rest in the shadow of a ruined wall. When you bed down for the night in a Camino refugio, you imagine the whispering ghosts of all the pilgrims who, over the span of a thousand years, have laid down their weary bodies in this same spot.

Camino geography takes you back and forth between the reality of physics and discomfort, and the perennial availability of joy. The weather is notoriously awkward. In 1997, spring storms turned some of the trails to porridge. There was a heat wave in 1998. The mountains make you sweat as you pick your way up through the trees, the endless roads leave you blistered and aching. But the light of the Camino is a balm, a translucence like a weightless wind upon the Spanish landscape. You see it playing in its oceans of wildflowers in the spring and its ripe, golden fields in the fall. Summer sunshine brightens the emptiness of the pancake plateau and cheers, ever so slightly, the solemnity of its mountain passes. In the forests of Galicia, light flits like a pianist's fingers among the eucalyptus trees, causing not sound, but scent, a sonata of resins, to play around your face.

In the dappled landscapes of the modern Camino, the old pilgrimage mystique may catch even the casual traveller off-guard. Though the Camino was forgotten by the world for centuries, its ruined buildings still exude confidence in the idea of pilgrimage. The smell of an old Christianity waits in the gapped walls of roofless monasteries that, even in their abandonment, have never lost their dignity. Faith lingers along the curving roofs and strange grotesques of Romanesque churches, and inhabits the arches of old stone bridges. The hopeful echo of prayers hangs by wayside crosses from the 14th Century.

The old pilgrim's confidence lives on in the people of the Camino today. I saw it in the friendly faces of believing pilgrims, felt it in the gentle hands of hostel volunteers as they cared for my blisters, and heard it in my conversations with the bright young priests in t-shirts I sometimes met in the churches.

But many strands of worldly life - a violent past and a welter of concocted myths, along with the tendrils of art and music and folklore - are braided into the Camino de Santiago. You discover these strands in ancient road markers, in gaunt old castles, Visigothic churches, foundries and prehistoric fountains, in old mines, menhirs, and stone fences separating worked and reworked farmlands. Parts of the Camino were already here when the Romans arrived in the 3rd Century before Christ. And since the time of Augustus Caesar, who got sick on the way west from León, the road has always clattered beneath the hooves and wheels and boots of travellers unconcerned with pilgrimage: Roman soldiers, Roman gold miners and villa owners, choppy waves of Germanic barbarians, Moors and Arabs from the deserts of Africa, the great French armies of Charlemagne, slave merchants, Jewish traders in wine and olives and silver, French churchmen, young men of promise heading to Burgos or León or Salamanca, crusty farmers, English whores, hardened criminals, vagrants from nowhere, Napoleon's imperial troops, Spanish royalists and revolutionaries and rebels and melancholy refugees. And now, the modern threads in the Camino: tourists with day packs up for a weekend from Madrid, vans delivering Coca-Cola, sport cyclists in shiny shirts and skin-tight shorts, farmers slouched on John Deere tractors, and women with scarves and stout legs goading a few cows with a stick.

In the Middle Ages Santiago was, after Jerusalem and Rome, the most important pilgrims' city in the western world. For five hundred years after James' tomb was discovered in the 9th Century, the faithful trudged into Spain from around the Christian world. All year long, but mostly in summertime, their walking sticks tapped the trail, engraved on its buckling surfaces their hopes for a glimpse of paradise in that far-off Santiago crypt. And even when the Protestants (my own spiritual ancestors) coldly stared it down and the rationalists explained it away - a shiny silver box of somebody's bones in a church floor - the bright allure of the tomb simply slipped out to become the allure of the Camino itself. An earthen road had metamorphosed into a good story, but like all good stories, it can change how you think.

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