Three
Holy Week had begun in Seville and the streets were jammed with dark processions.
Beginning on Palm Sunday an atmosphere of gloomy sanctity pervades this normally ecstatic, hand-clapping city and a religious sensibility settles over the towers of the Giralda and seeps downward into the squares and narrow streets. Even in the Triana district, where the gypsies live, especially here in fact, there is an aura of spirituality. Everywhere, lining the sidewalks and crowding into the streets, families dressed in their finest dark clothes push toward the squares and plazas in front of the local churches, waiting for the arrival of the processions of penitents who emerge from the open doors of parish churches throughout the various districts of the city and proceed through the streets, carrying towering floats depicting scenes from the last days of Christ. Here, in bright, realistic costumes, are Roman soldiers, hideous bleeding scenes of the crucifixion, complete with ruby blood drops, and the most popular of all: the bejeweled, silken-gowned statues of the suffering Virgin, some adorned with pearl tears. The floats are preceded and followed by lines of robed, medieval figures dressed in peaked witch hats and hooded masks pierced with eye slits, and led through the labyrinth of narrow streets by marching bands of coronets blaring out Moorish tunes in minor key. Here, in our time, is past time. There is an ominous, dark air to the event, a remembrance of the Grand Inquisitors and the rigors of the Inquisition.
The floats are not drawn by motorized vehicles but are carried on the shoulders of men obscured behind heavy purple drapes surrounding the platform. The great challenge of these processions is to navigate the high, wide floats around the sharp curves and corners of the narrow streets, especially the Serpiente, the main street, where crowds push and gather and cheer the float onward. Occasionally the carriers of these weighty platforms rest, and at these times from underneath the dark drapes sweating men emerge, their shoulders and white undershirts stained with blood from the weight of the floats, their heads wrapped in white protective towels. Exhausted, half-shaven, these are the mules of this ancient ritual, the true penitentes.
These processions lumber through the streets from Palm Sunday to Easter, and during this time the whole city comes to a halt. The event is organized by parishes or confraternities of men from different districts who meet throughout the year to plan and collect the funds to maintain the floats. All of the floats are elaborate, and whenever they are brought out from a church for their procession, crowds gather in front of the doors to watch. At these times, or just before, a woman will sing a saeta, a haunting aria to the Virgin. This song is also performed in a sad, minor key and, by tradition, is sung without electronic amplification and the crowd remains silent in order to catch every phrase. Of all the fifty-two confraternities, of all the processions and of all the many Virgins in the city of Seville, the most famous is the Virgin of the Macarena, who spends most of her life in the parish church of San Gil. The saca, or bringing out of the Macarena Virgin, is to most Sevillanos the pinnacle of the Holy Week, but in typically Spanish fashion, it is an event that occurs, not at some convenient daytime hour, but late at night, usually around one or two in the morning.
I had been to a number of Holy Weeks in the past, but since I was back in Seville on the day they were to bring out the Virgin of the Macarena, I decided to go again. Unfortunately, this year the event was scheduled for four in the morning. It had rained much of the day and I had caught up on sleep after dinner at my usual hangout, a place called the Alcazares, and I wandered over toward the square, stopping for a sherry now and then, and taking several coffees to keep myself up. In front of the small white church there were thousands of people. Soon a hush fell over the crowd; the front doors swung open and there she was, dressed all in white, her jewels and crown glittering in the spotlights. She stood unmoving, while from the left side of the plaza, the figure of a small woman appeared on a balcony and all eyes turned. A deep silence fell on the crowd. Never, in my experience, had so many people remained so still. The small woman extended her arms toward the statue. The air was frozen. And then the saeta—the arrowsong—pierced the damp air and flew toward the heart of the Virgin. It began in mid range, soared to a high note, and then dropped back to contralto, and wound through the crowds. Then the Virgin began rocking and twisting; she angled through the double doors and moved into the square. The crowd parted as she flowed through the plaza and disappeared down one of the narrow streets.
Solar fanatic that I am, I could not help but notice that the golden halo fixed at the back of her head glinted and gleamed in the light, very like the sun.
Mary was the virgin mother, the descendant, we are told by the mythologists who study this sort of thing, of the ancient goddess of the earth, not quite banished to obscurity by the male gods Zeus and Jehovah. But although she may be an earth mother, the Magna Mater of the old paleoreligions of the Iberian peninsula, her most resplendent feature, and one that characterizes the Virgin and her child and all the Christian saints, is that golden halo of sunlight, an ancient remembrance of the source of all religions.
None of this is surprising. Spain, although one of the most Christian nations on earth, retains some of the most primitive elements of the old primordial pagan religions, filled as it is with sacred processions, in the style of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the Panathenaean processions to the Parthenon and Bacchanalian celebrations in the form of the Feria, which follows on the heels of Easter.
When I first came to Europe, out of the cold strictures of the Protestant north, I landed in Algeciras, and somehow, quite by accident as I recall, ended up in Seville in the middle of the Feria celebrations. I was nineteen years old and not unfamiliar with wild parties, but this was a party that began at dusk and went on all night, and every subsequent night for the next ten days. The event rivals, maybe even surpasses, some of the great festivals on earth—the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio, and the Palio in Siena.
Feria begins, as did many of the exuberant celebrations of the pagan world, with the sacrifice of a bull toward dusk on the holiest of the holy days in the Christian year, Easter. The Sunday corrida before Feria is the command performance for Sevillian society. The women don their prized antique mantillas and traditional spotted and frilled dresses, lay on much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and brandish elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and a restless air of excitement spins through the stands. The major-domos arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville corrida as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero fincas. Water men circulate with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater hawking red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bullfight favorites, such as “El Gato Montes.”
Then, into the center of the arena, stride the gladiators, dressed for the occasion in their bright, solar-inspired “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses bearing the high-speared picadores, and as the band plays the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades.
Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a tension settles over the crowd. Silence descends and waits like a crouched cat. Suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, with his great spearpoint swinging horns, his shiny coat and his gleaming bright hoofs. He halts in mid arena, paws the sand, his eyes searching, his enormous horned head turning left to right, looking for the enemy that has trapped him in the small corral over the past few days. He trots around the ring, sniffing the air, pawing and snorting, and then, as bulls will do, he selects an area of the open space, his so-called querencia, or favored site, which he will defend to the death.
Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. The altar boys, or arena workers, scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the horsed picadores, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls, steps out.
He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight-backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerinalike killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who charges down on him again and again, his head lowered to better hook his opponent. Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros jab colorful barbed darts in his shoulders, ducking and dodging his flashing horns as they do so. Then the horse-borne picadores lance the bull’s neck muscles as he charges repeatedly into the sides of the padded horses, occasionally lifting them off their feet. Finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until, standing sideways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.
The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The dark, bloodied Minotaur staggers, sways, and collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon.
The crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and exits, his work completed.
Little wonder that this primitive rite has been the subject of much literature.
The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, caught up as I was, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and primal gods and goddesses, I perceived the bullfight in historical terms. As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to those of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures, this one was somewhat balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.
It is argued that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early twentieth century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with bull worship and one of the rituals of this veneration involved a dangerous dance in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed the ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers that he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the latest explanation, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray, is that the bull images in the palace of Knossos are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull-leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda, who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.
According to MacGillivray, the configuration of stars depicted on the wall paintings would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. The recurring image in Cretan art of two steep peaks, which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull, was a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivray argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and that, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax, labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillivray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles, represents the equality of day and night.
Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars, astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.
This view fit nicely with theories that related the early depictions of spirals and mazes engraved on cave walls and on Neolithic stone artifacts to the passage of the sun as it spiraled around the earth during the four seasons.
The bull fight is only one of the Spanish Easter rituals that evolved out of ancient traditions. Although the official date for the celebration of Easter was set by the Christian church in the ninth century, the early festivals associated with the Resurrection previously took place at the time of the vernal equinox and were tied to pagan fertility and agricultural rites. Among the ancient Greeks, the first day of spring was connected with the cults of Adonis and his Phrygian counterpart, Attis. The beautiful boy child Adonis was loved by both Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Zeus resolved the conflict by decreeing that Adonis should spend winter in the underworld and summer above ground with Aphrodite.
His Eastern counterpart, Attis, was a young shepherd boy beloved by Cybele, the Magna Mater, or Mother of the Gods, the greatest of the Asiatic goddesses of fertility. Like Jesus, Attis had a miraculous virgin birth. Both Attis and Adonis died young. Adonis was killed by a wild boar, and in some versions of the myth Attis castrated himself and bled to death beneath a pine tree. The tree became his symbol and was brought out during his festival day on the twenty-second of March. In Greece the death of Adonis was commemorated on earth by the blood-red windflower or scarlet anemone, which sprang up from the earth in those places where the drops of his blood had fallen.
Both Adonis and Attis are reborn each spring and their death and resurrection were celebrated in Greece and later in Rome in a mixture of mourning and festivity. Waxen images of Adonis or Attis were paraded through the streets, accompanied by music and cymbals and singing. In Rome the cults of Attis and the followers of his goddess lover Cybele developed ecstatic processions in which celebrants danced wildly through the streets, working themselves into a bloody frenzy of lamentation. Priests of the Attis cults sometimes castrated themselves during these frenzied processions.
The early Christians adapted the Adonis rites to the Easter celebrations of the resurrected Christ. Waxen images of the dead Christ were brought out from the churches and carried along the streets in elaborate, festive processions. In the early centuries of Christianity in Rome the coincidence of the resurrection of the gods, Christ, Attis, and Adonis, was a matter of great debate, with the pagans accusing the Christians of imitating the miraculous resurrection of the vegetative gods Adonis and Attis, and the Christians contending that the pagan rites were a mockery of the true faith. But both Easter and the Adonis cults have even deeper roots.
Two of the earliest historically recorded deities, the Babylonian fertility god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar, were closely connected to the solar year and the seasonal cycles. In the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, Tammuz died each year in autumn, and all the vegetation died with him. The lamentation of his lover Ishtar, the goddess of fertility and life, who was associated with the cycles of the moon, brought him back to earth in the spring; the flowers bloomed, the birds returned, and life appeared once more out of the dead land.
In fact much of this probably predates even Sumeria and may have taken place in prehistory at the very dawn of agriculture. The seed is buried in the cold earth, and around the time of the vernal equinox, in what must have seemed sheer miracle, the green shoots of life sprang up from the dead soils, fostered by the warming rays of the spring sun. No wonder there was cause for celebration.
The ritual Easter day slaughter of the bulls in Seville marks the beginning of the ten-day party of Feria. But since I had been before, I decided to leave Seville and spend Easter someplace else. I said goodbye to mother Anna, who wrapped me in her arms and rocked me from side to side and made me promise to return, and rode out through the rolling hills and fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir River toward the town of Lora del Río on my way to Córdoba.
Near the town of Alcalá I hit one of those terrible cobbled roads that nearly rattled my poor old Peugeot to death—one of the problems occasionally associated with travel on back roads, although far better than the major trunk roads with their storms of truck traffic. Toward dusk, I saw ahead of me the spiky turret of the Church of the Assumption towering over Lora del Río, and found, to my surprise, a good hotel on the town plaza. That evening a crowd gathered in the plaza below my hotel window and I went out on the balcony to see what was happening. On a balcony just opposite my room a woman in traditional dress stepped out. The doors of the church swung open and a statue of the suffering Virgin, all decked in silk and jewels, moved out to the street as the crowd hushed. The woman extended her arms toward the Virgin and then split the air with the most piercing, haunting saeta I had ever heard. The arrow of the song darted through the air toward the float and pierced the heart of the Holy Mother, and when the song was finished the crowd was too moved to applaud.
The road to Córdoba ran along the Guadalquivir River valley through a patchwork of greening spring fields with fresh-growing wheat and sunflowers interspersed with groves of orange trees. It was sunny and warm, and vast, round-bellied cumulus clouds rose all about the horizon beyond the river. At one point, pedaling along, thinking of nothing but the moment and listening to the shushing stridulations of the cicadas and the chirping of sparrows, I rounded a bend and beheld a fairy tale landscape lifted directly from the pages of a storybook. Ahead of me, at the top of the steep, jagged hill, were the towers and turrets of a Spanish castle.
The road twisted around the hill to the high battlements, and as I ascended I came upon other knights, crusaders, and pilgrims wending their way toward the heights. This was still a holiday and I supposed that many young people come out from Córdoba to visit the site. In low gear, I slowly pumped upward along the narrow road, stopping periodically to catch my breath, when suddenly there was a terrible, grating racket as my pedals slipped and my derailleur let go. I found myself stranded on the side of the steep hill.
By this time, I was too close to the castle to give up, and since there was nothing much I could do here to fix it, I walked the rest of the way and selected a quiet spot on one of the parapets to think things through. The landscape below the castle stretched southward in the afternoon sun, the slow winding river passed just below the heights, an expanse of fields dotted with copses of trees stretched to the horizon, and all around me, I could see the winging, darting forms of martins and swallows. In time I was joined by some Spanish students who gave me much advice, and even attempted, knowing nothing about derailleurs and even less about mechanics, to fix the problem. One of the young women said I should just give up and take the train to Córdoba and get it fixed in the morning.
“You do not want to spend the night in this terrible place,” she said.
I wondered why, and she explained that here, in the thick walls of this heavy, imposing castle, were the ghosts of those who had died in the dark interior dungeon.
“You can see them at night,” she explained. “They come out in the form of bats and flit around the towers where they died.”
That settled it. Following their instructions I coasted down the hill and walked or coasted my poor wounded horse to the station and took the train to Córdoba.
After some searching, at one hotel I was told, with a conspiratorial wink, that I could, if I would like, stay in the annex. I was not sure what I was getting into, but since there was no place else apparently, I agreed and was told to go to a certain bar near the river. The barman would give me a key and show me said annex.
I found the barman, a pleasant rounded fellow.
“You are staying in the annex?” he asked, incredulously, as if it were a hovel of a room.
I explained that, yes, I had agreed to stay in the annex. He shrugged.
“Follow,” he commanded.
He opened a door behind the bar, and we ascended three flights of narrow dark steps that stank of old cooking to a little landing. He opened another door and ushered me in.
Here before me was a luxurious light-filled room with a huge double bed and French doors giving onto a landing with a view over the river and the promenade. Wandering up from the river in the late afternoon light were small throngs of people headed for the evening round of tapas, and beyond the banks the huge, welling cumuli were rising over the lush fields and rolling hills on the other side of the river.
From roughly the tenth to the twelfth century, Córdoba was the intellectual center of Europe. It is, among other things, the site of the Mezquita, the Great Mosque, the third largest mosque in the world, although it is barely distinguishable now on the exterior and has been transformed into an odd, Islamic version of a Christian church. The city is the birthplace of the Roman playwright and philosopher Seneca and also the birthplace of the Jewish philosopher and doctor Maimonides. It was, furthermore, the home of the great Islamic intellectual Averroës, who was a contemporary of Maimonides. They both lived at the end of the ninth century.
Unlike Granada, the other surviving Islamic center in Spain, post-Moorish, Christian era Córdoba has swept over or left in ruins much of the splendor that was the former city. Nevertheless, enough remains in the form of little plazas and fountains and narrow streets and surprising little monuments to the great past of Cordoba to give one the sense of what once was here. As I wheeled my bicycle around the narrow streets in search of a derailleur, I passed the Mezquita, which was just above my annex, and decided to pay a visit.
I had been here once before some years earlier, and remember kneeling in the grooves on the stone flooring against a wall on the Mecca side of the mosque worn there by some four hundred years of faithful who knelt in this spot each day. For all its interior splendor, the glory days of the Mezquita had come to an end in the 1520s under the reign of King Carlos, who permitted the newly instituted Christian hierarchy to enclose the mosque in a Christian cathedral. Like a good tourist, I crossed through the courtyard of orderly orange trees and entered into the dark forest of the interior. Here, stretching off into the vast rooms and side chapels were the myriad pillars and arches and rounded domes of the original mosque, all topped and striped in red and carved with the glorious capitols of a rich past, the relics of Byzantia, Persia, Rome, Greece, and Syria, all of it now half obscured by the dark-walled chapels containing gloomy sixteenth-century portraits of suffering Christian saints. Originally the walls were open to the surrounding courtyard, but the Spanish builders had purposefully enclosed the mosque and sealed off the natural light and the air that once flowed freely through this holy site. The idea was to focus attention on the representation of Christian saints, and the icons and crosses of burnished gold, and to obscure the Moorish past, the alabaster niches and domes of fiery purples, greens, and gold, beset with roseate stones among the abstracted geometric squares and triangles intertwined with ornate vines.
At the height of the Caliphate, this mosque was surrounded with gardens and fountains and singing birds. Light and air spilled in through the open walls, the interior would have been filled with worshippers who would arrive here each day to face Mecca and pray. The Caliph himself would come to the Mezquita each Friday to lead the prayers, gauge the state of mind of his people, and revel in the glories of his collected art.
By the beginning of the ninth century, Córdoba had half a million inhabitants, with some seven hundred mosques and three hundred public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. Streets were paved and lit. The houses had marble balconies for summer cooling and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter and were adorned with gardens, fountains, and orchards. Paper, still unknown elsewhere in Europe, was everywhere, and there were bookshops and more than seventy libraries. Students from France and England traveled to Córdoba to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars to learn philosophy, science, and medicine. In the great library alone there were some 600,000 manuscripts. This rich and sophisticated, cosmopolitan society maintained a tolerant attitude toward other faiths. Jews and Christians lived in peace with their Muslim overlords. The culture actually had a literary rather than religious base and there was little or no Muslim proselytizing, although nonbelievers did have to pay an extra tax.
The Moors were also great mathematicians; among other things we can thank them for our numerals and for the concept of zero, which did not exist in other parts of Europe until after the twelfth century. They had also developed astronomical tables and were excellent celestial observers, in fact many of our star names, such as Deneb and Altair, are Arabic. They also brought north their theories on astronomy, and although they had an astronomy of their own by the time of the Caliphate, in A.D. 575 they had assimilated some of the theories of Aristotle and the Greek astronomer-philosopher, Ptolemy, who was born around A.D. 85 in Egypt and died about eighty years later in Alexandria.
Ptolemy’s major work, the Almagest, presents in detail the mathematical theory of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, based on an earth-centered system first described by Aristotle. According to the theory, the fixed stars—as opposed to the wandering stars, that is, the planets—rotate around the earth every day in vast concentric circles, along with the sun and moon. Ptolemy used geometric models to predict the positions of the sun, moon, and wandering planets, using combinations of circular motions known as epicycles.
It was through the teaching centers of Córdoba that Ptolemy’s so-called “Great Compilation,” which established the celestial workings of the sun, entered Europe. The system was obviously logical. The sun rose in the east, circled above the earth, and set in the west, so it seemed clear that the sky itself was circling. This theory had been brought to Cordoba by Averroës and made available to the Christian West via the translations from the Arabic into Latin.
The first translations, completed in 1185, were circulating at Oxford and the Sorbonne during the late twelfth century. The documents were further interpreted by European scholars, and were generally accepted, even though it was obvious to the discriminating mathematicians and astronomical observers that there were errors. The Europeans pored over the other translations from the Arabic of the Greek mathematicians, as well as the Arabic commentaries on the original sources, and by the end of the twelfth century the Ptolemaic model was established as the standard for the next four hundred years in Europe. It was not questioned until Copernicus came along and, through mathematical computation, began to seriously examine the accuracy of the Almagest. And it was not until the invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century that Galileo was able to establish scientifically the heliocentric theory that we accept today.
I was not having luck finding a derailleur in the city of Córdoba. In spite of the fact that the Easter holidays seemed to have come to an end, very few shops were open and the few bicycle shops seemed to be permanently shut, judging from the apparent age of the “closed” signs posted on the door. The one place that was open did not carry a derailleur. The concerned man who ran the place suggested that I perhaps go back to Seville, but knowing Seville, I suspected that I would run into the same problem. I said as much. He shrugged.
“Perhaps Madrid, then,” he offered.
This was an interesting proposal. I had been dreading the ride through the long, windy, dry plains of La Mancha and I knew that local trains had compartments to store bicycles, trunks, and even the occasional goat, so I decided to take him up on his suggestion. Every other living being in the city of Córdoba had the same idea it seemed. The trains were jammed and the only ticket I could get was a night train that left, in typical Spanish style, at 2:30 in the morning.