Travels with my Donkey

peace with our ancient emotions and live up to mankind's moral obligation to seek joy.
    Endeavouring to trace the origins of the camino's rebirth, I'd had to look back to its birth, and that meant going back beyond St James. If I started this quest believing religious faith to be a form of delusional madness, then I'd soon be encountering many other forms. Shirley MacLaine's The Camino, loosely billed as an account of her walk from St Jean to Santiago, mentions St James only twice, five pages from the start and five pages from the end. For Shirley, and not only for Shirley, the pilgrimage's roots go deeper: the route is at least as old as the Celts, a route along — inhale, exhale — telluric ley lines, a route that lies directly under the Milky Way and ends not at Santiago, but further west, on the coast at Finisterre.
    Finis terra, end of the earth — as Celtic geographers had calculated, this jutting promontory formed the left-hand edge of the known world (it seems unfair to criticise them for overlooking the rather more westward tip of Ireland, though if they hadn't their Gaelic brethren would have been saved a bit of a hike). The Celts were big on solar worship, and it's tempting to regard the camino's undeviating drive to that western-most cliff as a beeline to the sunset of sunsets. Certainly, some of the cairns built up from stones left by passing walkers have been dated to pre-Roman times.
    Shirley, most notable of the tens of thousands of Americans who have arrived in Santiago the hard way since the pilgrimage's renaissance, walked the camino to — and clearly I quote — understand the destructive fragmentation of our own souls. 'Thus I came to believe that the surface of the earth is the matter and form through which a higher subtle electromagnetic spiritual energy flows,' begins the second paragraph of her book; later highlights include 'I decided my stick was male', 'Taureans like to run with ankle weights on' and 'Was life my gorilla?'. Shirley is accompanied much of the way by an angel who smells of vanilla, reveals assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme as the reincarnation of Charlemagne, and describes at length — indeed for well over half the book's 307 pages — her own amoeba-like birth in a tank filled with gold liquid, at some unknown point in cosmic history, in the now submerged realm of Lemuria (where the temperature never falls below 52°F and multicoloured electromagnetic lizards share the sky with extraterrestrial crystal transporters).
    Shirl's is a book so mad it howls at the moon, a book that with any name on its cover but that of a Hollywood legend would have had orderlies with soft, placatory smiles knocking on the author's door. Yet The Camino has inspired countless pilgrimages, and reaching the last page (a page I'm ashamed to say now features a large ballpoint bird shrieking 'Cuckoo!' into a speech bubble) I thought I understood why. Just as I'd envy any full-on Christians I'd meet for their appealing belief in an eternal paradise, so, in a less straightforward fashion, I envied Shirley: an understanding of one's destiny in life, enhanced etheric vibrations in the brain, the multidimensional presence of gnomes, fairies and trolls — what's not to like?
    New Age mysticism offered answers to those big questions previously taken care of by organised religion: this was the pilgrimage's growth area. At its radical Shirlean fringe were those who believed that coded messages had been left along the camino for us to find and unravel, that the extraordinary number of towns it passed through featuring the Spanish word for 'goose' in their names (um, two) linked it, in some mysterious manner tantalisingly beyond our current comprehension, to a traditional board-based pastime entitled the Game of the Goose.
    In the mainstream were those content to ally themselves to the catch-all view I'd read in one introduction, that 'the camino represents the human desire to seek beyond the self, to delve deeper into the soul'. A little mystery, some embedded energy — in any event, there was just something about the camino, its cosmic ambience, its pagan and post-pagan history. You walked it and you walked in the shadow of the past. Surely all those millions of medieval devotees had left behind something more than mere footprints.
    These were the people who went to Santiago and embraced the apostle's gilded statue as tradition demanded, then caught the bus on to Finisterre, burnt their