The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

successive scenes naively portraying the chief dramatic events of the life of Jesus: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi and the flight into Egypt. Joseph while he sleeps is warned by the angel and sets out like a Jacobean pilgrim, carrying his scrip and cloak over his shoulders, while people looking out over the gateway watch the Holy Family depart.
    The work on these capitals is highly individual and crude compared with the perfection in the cloisters at Santo Domingo de Silos. Here there is a rough stylizing process: the modelling is generally done with incised lines and the hair and the beard are indicated by curving parallel lines. The eyes, in contrast to those in the figures at Silos, jut out as though they all had exophthalmic goitre. The hands and heads, too, are too large for the figure. But these stylistic exaggerations actually impress us with a sense of ceremonial dignity. They conjure up for us here in this terrifying setting the vision of a life forever threatened. A monk who prayed and worked in these cloisters needed to possess the mystical rapture of St. John of the Cross to escape the perpetual menace of that overhanging rock. He could, however, turn his back to the rock and look out from the cloisters through the narrow gorge at the distant sunlit valley beyond and its blue sky above.

THE HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL

    “Anselmo,” I said, “do tell me whether there are traditions of the Holy Grail in these mountains of Aragon. I have often visited Valencia to see the Santo Caliz in its chapel off the Cathedral.”
    “Here in San Juan de.la Peña,” he replied, “for six hundred years the monks were the guardians of the Holy Grail.”
    “I always thought that Montserrat was the mystical mountain of the Grail legend.”
    “And there are some who say, too, that a monastery in Provence was the home of the Holy Grail. But first let me tell you the story as I learnt it. The people here, and indeed in all Spain, believe that the Chalice that is today in Valencia was the very one that Christ consecrated at the Last Supper.”
    According to tradition, as Anselmo related it, the Chalice was among the treasures and relics that Pope Sixtus II entrusted to St. Laurence, who was from Huesca. The people had met Laurence at Saragossa and taken him back to Rome and made him archdeacon. When Sixtus was condemned to death by the Romans, because of his faith, he told Laurence not to grieve at losing him, for he himself would follow him in three days as martyr. But he was to take all the treasures of the Church and distribute them among the poor. Now among the treasures was the Holy Chalice of the Last Supper, and St. Laurence gave it in safe keeping to a Spaniard to take back with him to Huesca. It remained in the cathedral at Huesca until the coming of the Moors, when the bishop fled to the mountains and left it with the monks at San Juan de la Peña. It is a chalice of blood red translucent chalcedony, and was used for centuries by the abbots of the monastery when they celebrated Mass. In 1349 King Martin El Humano, wishing to secure so precious a relic, sent his counsellor, Antonio, Bishop of Athens, to reclaim it. At that time Benedict XIII was Pope, and, in order to win the favour of the King, he agreed to the Chalice being handed over, and on September 26 of that year Bernardo, the Prior of the Monastery, presented it to the King at Saragossa. Later in 1437 the Chalice was bestowed by King Alfonso V upon Valencia Cathedral.
    “Those are the facts of the story,” continued Anselmo, “but many people believe that the Holy Chalice, which our Lord used at the Last Supper was the same one in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of Jesus on the Cross, and that here in San Juan de la Peña originated the cult of the Holy Grail and the mystical chivalry of Parsifal and his son, the Knight of the Swan, Lohengrin.”
    “You make me dizzy, Anselmo, with your myths. I am sure that for you all of them are gospel truths.”
    “I believe in history, my friend; in documents, too, that cannot lie. But above the documents there is the truth that springs from eternal ideas. I believe in the Santo Cáliz as I believe in La Virgen del Pilar and Santiago Matamoros.”
    “Well, Anselmo, I will tell you some more about your myths. The legend of the Holy Grail grew out of the grail or cup, out of which our Lord partook of the Last Supper, and which after his