Shortly after my father and brother died, a woman showed up to one of my workshops using a cane and wearing a cast over what apparently was a seriously injured foot.
She sat near the front of the room, and as the class was assembling, I asked her what had happened. She said she had injured her ankle while walking the Camino de Santiago and had to quit before she completed it. She then asked me if I knew about the Camino, which I admitted I didn’t.
“Oh Sonia, if anyone should walk the Camino it’s you,” she gushed.
“Really?” I answered, intrigued. “You think so?”
“Absolutely,” she reassured me, without going into why she thought that.
“I’ll look into it,” I responded. But then after the class began, I didn’t think about it again. At least not for a while.
About six months later, I was teaching a workshop in Australia and another student came up to me and asked if she could show me some photos she took while walking the Camino.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I feel that I must show you these.”
While the photos themselves weren’t terribly remarkable, seeing them nevertheless had a strange impact on me. As she gave them to me, one at a time, I had the strangest feeling I had been there before. In fact, it was such a strong feeling of déjà vu that I had a difficult time concentrating on my class for the first few minutes.
I meant to talk to the woman more about the Camino after class, but as soon as it ended, she disappeared. That night I had intended to look up information on the Camino on the Internet, but as is so often the case after teaching a class, once I had dinner, I went to my room and immediately fell asleep.
I thought more about the Camino on the flight home the next day. Still feeling the impact of those photos, I decided that it was something I would put on my bucket list to do someday.
When I got home, I looked into it a little more, but still not too seriously. I was so busy with other things that it kept getting pushed to the back of my mind.
That’s why I was taken by surprise when I woke up and received this intuitive directive. I literally said out loud, as if to my Higher Self, or my spirit guides, or the Universe at large, or whatever spiritual influence was sending me this message, “Okay. I hear you. I’ll go.”
Only I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.
So I got online and started to learn what I could about the Camino.
The Camino was one of the three major pilgrimages in the Catholic religion. There was the pilgrimage to Rome, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Camino to Santiago, Spain, where it is believed that the bones of James the Apostle are buried.
In the Middle Ages, this path, also known as the Way of St. James, or simply The Way, was traveled by over a million Catholic “peregrines,” or pilgrims, who walked it as a plenary indulgence to be forgiven their sins and made new in the eyes of the Lord. Or at least the Church. Due to this it had also become known as The Way of Forgiveness, which is clearly the way I was seeking.
As I read about the Camino, chills ran through my entire body. I knew in some deep part of my being that I had already walked this path once before. The sensations were vague, but unwavering. I simply knew it was true but could not access more than this overwhelming feeling.
Legend has it that the apostles, after the death of Christ, were sent off all over the known world—India, Egypt, Africa, Armenia, Persia—to spread the word of Christ. Catholic documents say James the Apostle was sent to Spain to convert the nonbelievers. He wasn’t that successful, however. He only managed to convert seven people in twelve years.
In A.D. 42 he returned to Jerusalem, where his luck changed and he began to convert people by the scores, including a known sorcerer named Hermogenes. This impressed the crowds and drew all the more converts to him but angered a Judaic monarch, Herod Agrippa, who had St. James arrested and executed, then had his body thrown over the city walls where wild animals could devour it.
But his loyal followers recovered his body and sent it back to Spain in a rudderless stone boat, where it eventually landed on the Galician coast in northwestern Spain, surrounded by scallop shells.
All seven of his original converts received his body and took it inland for a proper burial. That was the last anyone heard of St. James for another 800 years.
Then one day, a hermit named Pelayo, who led a quiet, isolated life, was awakened out of his daily routine when he noticed a brilliant star overhead.
He then heard celestial music, which caused him to rush to the local bishop and report what had occurred. He was followed back to where he’d had his vision by a group of local peasants who, armed with picks and shovels, discovered a tomb deep inside a dark cave near the site. In the tomb lay a body and a letter that said, “Here lies James, son of Zebedee and Salome, brother of St. John, beheaded in Jerusalem. He came by sea, born of the disciples.” This location where the tomb was discovered became known as the Santiago de Compostela (St. James Field of the Star). A church was soon constructed on this site.
Spanish bishops and kings were very excited, even ecstatic, over this discovery, and began encouraging pilgrims to walk to Santiago. Soon they came by the millions from all over Europe.
The Catholic Church, a vast power at the time, sent a group of highly religious and fearless Crusaders, known as the Knights Templar (or Knights of the Temple), to protect the pilgrims from thieves as they made their way to the shrine.
Their service as protectors of pilgrims expanded across Europe, from Jerusalem to Spain and Portugal. In support of the protection of pilgrims, the Knights Templar created what was to become the first banking system, allowing pilgrims to deposit their money with them in one city and collect it in another, so they could travel without worry, no longer making the pilgrims easy prey for robbers while on the road.
Because of their impeccable credit and upright means of protecting money, the Knights Templar became both extremely wealthy and powerful, often rivaling the power of kings.
They built several cathedrals and castles, which served both as monasteries and military posts, their powers increasing with time as the reigning popes exempted them from taxation and other oppressive jurisdictions enforced upon ordinary citizens.
Their rise in power eventually led to jealousy and accusations of being lovers of power and money by their enemies, in part due to their increasingly secret requirements for those who sought to join their ranks, coupled with their financial sovereignty.
As they became more powerful, they began to ask knights applying to join their ranks to take secret tests to establish their sincerity. These ceremonies and tests were never publically revealed, which ultimately led the Templars’ downfall. Because of their secrecy, the Knights Templar came under extreme suspicion and were subjected by their enemies to the most outrageous accusations, from heresy to idol worship to sodomy and more, some of which the accused confessed to after being arrested and made to endure horrific forms of torture.
On October 13, 1307, Philip the Fair, king of France, a manipulative man who was greatly indebted to the Knights Templar and both unable and unwilling to pay back what he owed, put out secret orders to round up all the Knights Templar across Europe and try them for crimes against both God and the Church in order to take away their power, thus leading to the infamy of the date, Friday the 13th.
Due to extreme torture used against the wrongly accused Knights, many of them made false confessions, including the grand master of the Knights himself, a man named Saladin. Some of these innocent men were sentenced and burned at the stake in Paris; others were killed elsewhere. Those in Spain and Portugal escaped this fate and were not accused of any wrongdoing, although all were eventually retired.
As I read this, my feelings of déjà vu intensified. I had had, ever since childhood, recurring dreams of being part of some sort of secret Catholic society, rife with extreme rituals, and devoted to the protection of people. The more I read about the Knights Templar who protected the ancient pilgrims, the more I was overwhelmed with a sense of knowing and, surprisingly, grief and sorrow.
I had written about these dreams in my first book, The Psychic Pathway, 13 years earlier and had spoken about them on many occasions to both my family and my students. I had spontaneously mentioned, almost without thinking, many times that I had once upon a time been a Knight Templar myself, and felt an intensely strong connection to Crusaders and the medieval Catholic Church.
Funny how those dreams had faded in the past few years, having been such a big part of my life since I was a child. And yet, as I was researching the Camino, I felt the same eerie, ominous feelings I had in all those dreams.
I had long been considered and called a warrior, and had even been laughingly referred to as Joan of Arc by some of my closer friends for my fearless ability to confront and fight whatever I considered to be an affront to my spirit or the spirit of someone I loved. And yet, it was that very same warrior self that I longed to leave behind.
I was done protecting and defending the inner world—the world of spirit, intuition, and authentic personal power—and standing up to those who denigrated my work, and my world. I was also tired of fighting for the underdog and the oppressed at my own expense, and carrying those who I feared could not carry themselves. I was especially done fighting the “enemy” in my husband, or anyone else for that matter.
All of this flashed across my mind as I discovered more and more about the history of the Camino. I knew in my heart that perhaps this was one of the greatest reasons why I had to make this pilgrimage: to bring closure to an ancient story and identity that I no longer resonated with. Inside my being was a dark, heavy, patriarchal energy suffocating my inner feminine.
The self I yearned to be and express no longer resonated with the warrior essence. While I loved my strength, my fire, and my courage, I was war weary and needed to lay down my defenses and open my heart to a different kind of strength.
That is why I had to walk the Camino. I knew it in my heart.