The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Nogués, printed in the monastery the work written by his abbot entitled Patrocinio de Angeles y combate de demonios (1652).
    First of all we visited the Council Chamber, where King Ramiro I used to preside over the Bishop, the Abbot and the prelates of Aragon. It was here that the meeting was held in the middle of the eleventh century when Sancho El Mayor introduced the reform of Cluny into Spain. Owing to the interest of King Ramiro I and his successors the power of the Abbots grew apace, but the King preferred to appoint as abbots men who were humble, and one of the most famous, St. Iñigo Arista, who was a Mozarabic hermit living in a cave in the mountains, was nominated Abbot and became a great prince of the Church. The Abbot, in fact, was not only a great ecclesiastical but also a great temporal head in Aragon: sixty-five monasteries and one hundred and twenty-six churches depended upon San Juan de la Peña. The crypt or primitive church is rectangular and is divided down the centre by a row of piers on which rest horseshoe arches, and there are loopholes instead of windows. It was built in the reign of King Sancho Garcés I (905-25), who transformed the earlier hermitage into a ceno-bium for monks with an abbot. In this crypt we have Latino-Byzantine influences.
    After ascending the twenty-six steps to the atrium we came to the royal pantheon with its twenty-six carved tombs of kings, princes and abbots placed in two rows of niches. What is noteworthy in this pantheon of the early monarchs is its extreme simplicity. All that we see are two rows of lunettes without any trophées or epitaphs but merely the Chrism, or the Cross of Sobrarbe, or devices such as the so-called emblem of the Abbot St. Iñigo Arista, which is a cross with a fleuron in the four corners. The pantheon, according to Lampérez, was built in the twelfth century and is the most complete Romanesque pantheon in existence, and he adds that it was undoubtedly imitated from the columbaria or niches in the Roman cemeteries. *
    It should be remembered also that until the thirteenth century only saints, bishops, abbots and kings were buried inside churches, though kings were often interred in the crypts. Founders of churches and monasteries and distinguished persons were generally buried in the porches, cloisters or in the outer wall of the church.
    Anselmo then led me through a door of horseshoe shape from the church into the cloisters and said, pointing to the archivolt: “Look at the inscription”:

    Porta per hanc coeli fit previa fidelis,
    Si studeat fidei jungere jussa Dei.
    (Through this door the faithful enter into heaven,
    if in addition to the Faith they keep the laws of God.)

    “You will find the same inscription,” he said, “on many Romanesque church doors: in the church we have just seen at Santa Cruz de la Seros, in the Cathedral of Jaca and in the portal of the Castle of Loarre.”
    The door with its horseshoe arch and Mozarabic lettering produced an uncanny effect on me. It made me think of the mysterious little door in the Bad Wall, which the young Goethe saw in his dream-walk on the ramparts of Frankfort; and, ever since, I have continually dreamed of that horseshoe door in San Juan de la Peña, which became for me, in its simplicity, as significant as the Moorish Puerta del Sol in Toledo. Lampérez, whom I consulted, believed that the door, which was unlike any other in the monastery, was a lonely survival of the original hermitage; others like Ricardo del Arco say it dated from the days of Sancho Garcés I. It certainly became for me a magic door that day, for opening it we found ourselves in the holy of holies, the cloisters of San Juan, with their priceless sculptures.
    Above our heads no roof but the gigantic overhanging rock, which threatened to annihilate us. There stand these cloisters without a vault, unprotected and at the mercy of the elements. Yet when we examine the sculptures on the capitals we enter mysteriously into the society and life of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
    In one corner begins the story of Genesis and the creation of Adam and Eve, their temptation by the serpent and the rebuke by God. There we see Adam ploughing with two oxen, just as the farmers are doing today on the slopes below the monastery, while Eve spins and Cain and Abel solemnly offer the lamb and the sheaf of wheat respectively to the Creator. The adjacent capitals transport us to the New Testament and we see