Off the Road (2 page)

For many people, the entire
language of religion is symbolic in this way. Even as I was growing up, god was
being refined out of literal existence. In St. Philip’s parish hall, the
psychedelic banners declared in letters cut from curving felt, “God is Love.”

Metaphor is a powerful
literary device, but only if it is grounded to a literal meaning. Pure metaphor
is corrosive and enfeebling. Think of Prince Charles.

I understood that I was
assuming a vocabulary that had this medieval ring to it but had retained its
breadth and complexity long after that age had ended. Chaucer rightly suspected
that a pilgrimage would easily serve as the stage for the hapless circus of the
entire human comedy. The passengers on the
Mayflower
adopted this word
because they were convinced that they would transform themselves and the world,
and they thought the word could adequately contain such ambition. In the
Romantic period, “pilgrim” was one of William Blake’s favorite words because of
its multiplicity of connotations. According to legend, Samuel Coleridge awoke
from a nap to compose “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Not coincidentally,
the book he was reading when he fell asleep was titled
Purchas: His
Pilgrimage.
In the post-World War II era, only John Wayne and Kurt Vonnegut
seemed to have preferred its ring.

As a tenderfoot pilgrim, the
more I tried on this awkward word, the more I liked its ill fit. Heaven may no
longer be literally above our heads, but the road is still beneath our feet.
And until we invent our way beyond ground transportation, the word will retain
its express sense of action. A pilgrimage is both inescapably metaphorical and
literal, and I wanted to walk them both.

But why settle for the road
to Santiago, instead of the far more prestigious routes to Rome or, especially,
Jerusalem? My preference for Santiago has to do with my own rank
qualifications for such a trip. In 1981, just after college, I had walked the
asphalt simulacrum paved by the generalissimo. Since then I’ve kept up my
reading on the history of Santiago and have grown to admire the road’s patron
saint. I appreciate him because whatever flaws I have, James is no one to talk.

In old Spanish the name
Iago
dates to the collapsing of the Latin name
Jacobus,
who after
canonization became “Santiago.” In English this linguistic journey turned
“Jacobus” to James. As a man, James is always described as a major player among
Jesus’ apostles, one of the top three along with his brother John and Peter.
James was present for the transfiguration, when Jesus turned into a column of
light. He was among the three intimates invited into the garden of Gethsemane for the agony when Christ begged that “this cup pass from me.” Despite this
privileged status, the Bible isn’t very forthcoming about him. James’s
character is sketchy. He almost never speaks. But in the scattered clues, he
slowly comes into focus. James’s mother was Salome, said to be Mary’s sister,
making James a first cousin toJesus. Salome had money and reportedly funded a
lot of Jesus’ work, including paying for the Last Supper. She was also the Holy Land’s version of a stage mother, constantly promoting her sons to Jesus.

In the gospels, James always
appears alongside his brother John, and the two of them come across as
dim-witted sycophants who snaked their way into the boss’s confidence but
didn’t know what to do once they got there.

On one occasion, Christ is
confronted by skeptics. James and John tell Jesus just to give them the
word—wink, wink—and they will eliminate those doubters by calling down a
thunderbolt from above. In the words of Luke 9:54: “Lord, wilt thou that we
command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?” Christ shushes them and
says, “The Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to
save
them.” During this exchange, the reader senses that Jesus is beginning to
understand just what kind of men James and John are. According to Luke, Jesus
“turned” to them and said, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.” This
line is from the King James version, the most elegant English translation of
the Bible. One can’t help but wonder what Christ
actually
said. Later,
Jesus starts calling James and John by a nickname—Boanerges, or “Sons of
Thunder.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Jesus is being sarcastic here.

Another time, James and his
brother pull Christ aside from the other apostles. Quietly they ask if they can
occupy the most important seats in heaven—at his side, one on the right, the
other on the left. Even in the King James version, Jesus’ annoyance survives
the shellacking of a high-minded translation. According to Mark (10:38), Christ
says, “Ye know not what ye ask.” Jesus goes on to say that they cannot expect to
sit beside the throne. “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” he asks.
James and John, never quick to take a hint, immediately answer, “We can.” Jesus
stumbles at their audacity but gets out of this uncomfortable situation by
saying, it “is not mine to give.”

The other apostles were
jealous of James and John for several reasons—the two were cousins of Jesus’,
their mother had money, and they were incorrigible lickspittles. When word got
around that the twosome had asked for the prime seats in heaven, the other
apostles fell into a dark mood, according to Mark (10:41): “And when the ten
heard
it,
they began to be much displeased with James and John.” What is
interesting about this story is not that James is once again revealed to be an
apple-polisher, but it would appear that Jesus had really grown to dislike
James and his brother. Applying the methods of investigative journalism to the
Bible might not be fair, but consider: Who leaked the brothers’ secret request
so that the other ten apostles would be unhappy? Chances are it wasn’t James or
John.

Yet James served his leader
unfailingly to the end. After proselytizing around the Holy Land, the last we
hear of James (Book of Acts) is his return to the realm of King Herod, who
welcomed him home with martyrdom. And that’s the end. It’s a pretty good story
but inadequate to the demands of pilgrimage. Ironically, that’s what made him
perfect for the job of patron. James was as highly ranked as Peter or John, yet
he was merely an outline, a skeletal character. There was a lot of room for
embellishment. In the ninth century in northern Spain, one began to hear some
extra-biblical tales.

One story explains that
James had come to Spain just after the crucifixion of Christ to convert the
Roman citizens of Hispania. He utterly failed, winning over fewer than a dozen
new believers. James then returned to the Holy Land where King Herod beheaded
him and threw his parts outside the city wall to be eaten by wild dogs.

Devotees of James collected
his head and corpse and carried them to the beach. Two of the associates placed
the body on an empty boat, and miraculously it set sail, piloted only, it is
said, by the love of the Virgin Mary. The ship navigated eastward to Gibraltar and then north along the Portuguese coast to the end of the world, Finisterre.
When James’s disciples landed, they tied the bowline to a stone stele, which
still stands on the shore. For centuries, the diaries of pilgrims who visited
Finisterre mentioned a stone boat marooned on the beach. (A Flemish pilgrim
named Jean Taccouen, who walked the road in 1512, reports that he saw it
resting on its side. The locals told him that only a Christian who had attained
a state of grace could move it. Mr. Taccouen adds wryly, “I have not spoken to
anyone who has budged it.”)

The disciples brought the
body ashore and laid it on a stone slab, which went soft like wet clay, leaving
a bas-relief of the apostle. The ruler of this area, a vicious pagan queen
named Lupa, greeted her visitors in a diplomatic way and sent them to see a man
named Beleth, whom she knew would kill them. When Beleth jailed the disciples,
an angel released them. When Beleth’s knights chased them across a river, the
bridge collapsed and drowned the pursuers. Queen Lupa then dispatched them to a
mountain range she knew to be inhabited by dragons and wild bulls. When the
disciples arrived, a dragon spit fire and charged, but a quick sign of the
cross split him in two. The wild bulls charged, but another sign of the cross
reduced them to complacent beasts of burden. When the disciples returned with
the wild bulls pulling their cart, Queen Lupa awakened to the inadequacy of her
creed and converted at once. The bulls slowly dragged their heavy load another
few miles and suddenly stopped at a temple to Bacchus. The pagan statue
immediately disintegrated. The disciples mixed the dust with water to make the
cement for a shrine. They called this place Santiago de Compostela—the city to
which I am headed.

In death, though, James had
no better luck in Spain than in life. The conversions still numbered no more
than Queen Lupa and a few others. After these and the disciples died, the body
was left in a cave and forgotten for nearly eight centuries.

In
a.d.
814 a hermit named Pelayo lived in the northwest corner
of Spain, eating insects and scavaging for honey. One evening he looked into
the night sky and saw a series of strange lights near the river Sar. They
seemed to be indicating a direction, growing smaller and smaller as they
approached earth until they were nothing more than spangles of light dancing in
the brush. Pelayo followed them and heard the singing of angels. He informed
the bishop, Theodomir, who dispatched a crew of men to hack through the dense
undergrowth. They came upon a cave. Inside was a sepulcher and papers declaring
that it contained the body of Saint James. Theodomir told the pope, and soon Rome declared an official pilgrimage to the site. The apostle was instantly elevated to a
new status.

For the Catholic Church, the
discovery of James’s body was conspicuously timely. In the previous century,
invading Moors had conquered all but the hardscrabble northern strip of Spain —precisely where the pilgrimage route is located. Arab soldiers stood poised to
breach the Pyrenees and take Christendom. They had already crossed the
mountains a few times, most famously repelled in 732 by Charles the Hammer at Poitiers, France.

The Church, which had no
army and had a divine commandment forbidding killing, found the site a good way
to lure men, money, and arms into northern Spain. But the pilgrim’s trail
turned out to be much more useful than just a boot camp for a holy war. Without
knowing it, the Church had also stumbled upon a new way of generating great
wealth. The continual ebb and flow of skilled and unskilled people created what
residents of Florida or California would recognize as a tourist economy. For
the next five centuries, Santiago would draw enough men and goods into Spain not only to defeat the Moors but also to power the Spanish Empire’s economy until New World gold could take over.

James, once a clumsy
yes-man, was now a poster boy who was always changing costumes to meet the
changing needs of a medieval Catholic bureaucracy. His earliest images were of
a simple pilgrim. The first polychromatic statues show an earnest fellow in a
cloak and hat. He is almost always depicted as a man on foot, eternally about
to take that next step. But as the pilgrimage drew millions of people, the road
developed different meanings and uses. And so did James.

In the early ninth century,
for example, the Christians were routinely being slaughtered. The Moors had all
the physical advantages of men, horses, and arms. But they also had the arm of
Mohammed, said to be in a vault in the south of Spain. One of the benefits of
such a divine possession was that their messiah appeared in the sky on a
charger and led them into combat. Mohammed would not be alone up there for
long.

At the battle of Clavijo in
845, James appeared in his first major conflict. He was now a giant in the sky,
riding upon a horse and swinging a sword. He killed sixty thousand Arabs that
afternoon, according to reports. James’s appearances as a fighter against
infidels became so common that it earned his new image a nickname. Always
mounted—sword in one hand and a bearded head dripping gore in the other—he was
simply Santiago Matamoros: Saint James, Moor-killer.

It was a remarkable
transformation. None of the other roads has adapted itself so nakedly and so
successfully to changing times. Despite the pilgrimage’s status as the most
tired of clichés, the traditions of Santiago have quite effectively subverted
and survived them all. That, too, is why I wanted to follow this road.

In the heyday of religious
peripeteia, the three great routes to Santiago, Rome, and Jerusalem bound the
world of Christendom with a belt of serene traffic—Santiago to the west, Jerusalem to the east, and Rome in the center. In some ways, they were competitive. Each
had its own emblem. Santiago promoted the scallop or cockle shell. Pilgrims to Rome wore a small key on their cloaks and were called romers. Those going to Jerusalem laced a swatch of palm in their clothes and were called palmers.

But even among the big
three, Santiago was distinct. Pilgrims to Rome or Jerusalem could go for any
number of reasons. Jerusalem had prestige and Rome was a political center, so
any pilgrimage there was practically a junket. But Santiago had little appeal
beyond that plain idea of a long walk.

Dante Alighieri favored Santiago’s simple clarity. “In the wider sense,” he wrote in
La Vita Nuova,
a
pilgrim is “whoever is outside his fatherland,” but “in the narrow sense, none
is called a pilgrim save he who is journeying toward the sanctuary of Saint
James of Compostella.” Among lesser routes, pilgrimage typically had to provide
some other draw, such as supernaturalism. Pilgrims to Lourdes in France
expected
a miracle and were disappointed if they didn’t get one. Although
miracles were associated with Santiago, this was never the only attraction.
Most pilgrims of St. James came and went without any cures, or with the
standard minimum (at that time) of signs and wonders.