The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

crucifixion received His blood. It was brought, so we in my country believe, to Avalon, or Glastonbury in England. That story united with another old story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, with whom the Grail was deposited. But the story spread all over Europe and the troubadours of South France believe their Grail was located in Montserrat (the Mountain of Salvation), or perhaps Mont-Sauvage, the Wild Mountain, near Roncesvalles, about which the Jacobean pilgrims have for centuries told fearsome tales, of the punishments of Hell and the Bridge of Dread.”
    “Jesús, qué escándalo!” cried Anselmo, blessing himself to me. “Every word you have is rank blasphemy: however, as you are a stranger I will forgive you. Es Vd. inglés, and England after all is the land of heretics. But we have a saying that whoever contemplates the Holy Grail with pure intention in his heart will not die in a week.”
    I accepted Anselmo’s rebuke meekly. I was, however, thrilled to find myself suddenly spirited on to the trail of the Holy Grail legend and Parsifal and Lohengrin, for suddenly memories swept over me of the performance of Parsifal which I had witnessed in Bayreuth twenty-years before. On that occasion I had been privileged, through the kindness of the widow of Siegfried Wagner, to visit the Master’s library in Wahnfried, and I remembered with what excitement I opened his volumes of Calderon’s plays marked with his pencilled notes in the margins and other Spanish works in addition to the editions of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes. The music drama, performed in the Master’s Festspielhaus on the hill outside Bayreuth, with his hidden orchestra, the conca sonora, as d’Annun-zio called it, and its stimmung, had been one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life, not only because of the poetry and the bewitching music, and the ravishing beauty of its orchestration, but because of the blend of mediaeval and post-mediaeval occultism, Alchemy, Astrology, Rosicrucianism, and the passionate quest of death. As I listened to the prelude of Parsifal welling up from the depths of the theatre and expanding into the mystical portrayal of the rocky mountainous country surrounding the Grail Temple, I tried mentally to imagine where Wagner intended to situate the castle of the Knights of the Grail and the enchanted castle of Klingsor, the magician. He states that the region of the Grail was in the northern mountains of Gothic Spain and Klingsor’s castle in the southern spur of the same mountains near Arab Spain.
    As I wander through the passes of these mountains near San Juan de la Peña the scenery continually reminds me of Parsifal. The first act of the drama is set in rocky, mountainous country in the region of the Grail Temple, which is out of sight. There are thick woods, but with a clearing whence one can see the peaks of the sierra. In the third act we see a flowering glade sloping upwards; woods at one side and near the fountain a hermit’s hut in the shadow of an overhanging rock, which recalls the rock and original hermitage of St. Voto. All the scenic details that impressed me so much at Bayreuth remained graven in my memory, because Wagner, unlike any musico-dramatic creator who ever lived, wrote and composed simultaneously and created his drama out of nature itself, so that we continually find ourselves visualizing the details of the scene as we listen to his music.
    As I gazed from the cloisters upon that distant sunlit valley at the end of the gloomy gorge framed by the precipitous cliffs I understood the idyllic quietism which the great composer tried to express in the last scene of Iris Swan Song, in contrast to the sinister tempest which dissolved Klingsor’s magic garden. In that distant valley I should rejoin the pilgrims plodding their way towards Santiago.

THE LAND OF THE JOTA

    It is instructive to turn back to our old twelfth-century mentor, Aymery Picaud, and read his precise descriptions of the Pyreneans with whom he came into contact, whether Gascons, Spanish Basques, Aragonese or Navarrese.
    In the Guide in the fifth book of the Codex Calixtinus he contrasts sadly his beloved fatherland of Poitou ‘full of every blessing’ and inhabited by ‘forceful men, heroes everyone of them’, with the Pyrenean lands he traversed on his way to Santiago. The wine of Bordeaux he praised but not the language nor the habits of the people. As for territory of the Landes he