Ara Solis, Finisterre, Galicia

(among the most magical (and often most-overlooked) places on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, begun on 6 June 2014)   

Finisterre, an outcropping of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean along Galicia’s rugged fishing coast, is considered a final destination of the Camino after Santiago de Compostela. Here, the old Roman road across northern Spain also ends, marked by the Ara Solis, an altar to the dying sun. It was once located on the highest point near Finisterre’s present-day lighthouse. 

Finisterre also appears to have been the end of an initiatory road dating back before the Romans, to Celtic and perhaps Neolithic times, as indicated by the ancient remains of a nearby Neolithic stone circle on Monte San Guillermo and other Neolithic and Celtic remains sprinkled along Finisterre’s jagged coastline. 

Pre-Christian lore survives concerning fertility rites among women who were having trouble getting pregnant: They would visit a dolmen nearby, on Mount Fache, a tall, vertical dolmen that once stood there, hoping to improve their chances through proximity to its symbolic potency. Too explicit and disturbing for an 18^th century bishop, he had the dolmen destroyed. While the dolmen is gone, the climb is exhilarating for the stunning view and feeling of being on top of the world.

The most magical (and often most-overlooked) places on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Thanks especially to Shirley MacLaine, Paolo Coelho, and Martin Sheen, the Way, the Camino across northern Spain, is as popular today as it was in the Middle Ages. 

But unlike medieval pilgrims who were taking their time, modern pilgrims tend to miss some of the most magical sites on the Camino, walking right past them in a rush to their next bed or meal. 

The Camino emerged in the ninth century after a hermit discovered the tomb of Saint James the Greater, one of Jesus’ twelve disciples, on a hilltop in northwestern Spain. That hilltop, which was also an ancient Neolithic burial ground, later became known as Santiago de Compostela, the Camino’s destination. 

The Camino was medieval Europe’s great adventure for the devout and the restless alike, and a repository of sacred and mystical lore sourced as much from its Christian birth as from the pagans, Jews, and Muslims who also lived and built along it. They collectively left a chain of magical sites strung across the wild beauty of northern Spain. 

In the next several blog entries, I share what I feel are the most magical but most often overlooked sites. I’ll begin by going backwards, the Other Way, as I like to call it, at the Atlantic coast in Galicia at Finisterre…

The Pilgrimage Roads to Santiago de Compostela

A YouTube video from an enchanting evening at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, talking about the Camino in France and Spain:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNXcSKu1U2E.

Romancing Neanderthals

I am about to head off to France for the summer to work on a book concerning Neanderthals and an international group of paleoarchaeologists who specialize in Neanderthals and early modern humans. For the Pilgrim's Way Cafe it is the ultimate pilgrimage to our roots. It also has me meditating upon our romance and popular imagination when it comes to these interesting human cousins.


The mass appeal of Jean Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear has shown that a lot of people are fascinated by this romantic tale of a young Upper Paleolithic woman, Ayla, and her adoption by a clan of Neanderthals. Auel’s book has also revealed that modern people, in some small or great way, romanticize Neanderthals and in a way that we don’t romanticize ourselves.

There is a constant pendulum swing of theories about the Neanderthals, who they were, and why they went extinct around 30,000 years ago, mostly, they say, thanks to us. These theories are engaging in part because the factual evidence, though growing, is still so scant that we want to fill in the spaces with a good human story. And it is a human story.

Not so long ago, based on the reading of the evidence, Neanderthals, already unquestionably established as skilled toolmakers, were also afforded art making, fire making, burial rites, and language. Recently, based on new evidence, some archaeologists find that Neanderthals used fire but it looks like they didn’t make it, that ritual burials may not have been the norm, and that what language and symbolic thought they had were restricted both physically and also culturally, meaning, maybe they had the burgeoning skills but did not trust that way of working in the world. This is in contrast to us moderns who took symbolic thought and ran with it. (But, this does suggest that Neanderthals had culture, which is a very human trait indeed.)

This assertion puts forth that our trust in the ability of symbolic thought and its cultivation over many generations led to new and more complex ways of living in our environment and gave us a survival edge, especially when food sources were scarcer. This adaptive difference became more apparent as we migrated into areas in Asia and Europe where Neanderthals lived; our ways may have competed with theirs in the same environment and maybe contributed to their extinction some 30,000 years ago.

But we did mingle. Recent DNA analyses of Neanderthal bone samples proved definitively that we interbred and that between 1-4 percent of DNA from modern humans from Asia and Europe is shared with Neanderthals. Which comes back to Auel’s evocative and poignant portrait of Ayla’s life among the Neanderthals, who even if more limited linguistically and symbolically, were no less feeling and sensitive.

Most recently, a new theory is circulating. Based on analyses of Neanderthal eye sockets and crania, it suggests that Neanderthals relied more on sight than we do; it suggests that while Neanderthals were dedicating a good chunk of their brain-power to visual skills, it came at the cost of developing other parts of the brain, such as the frontal lobe.

It is an intriguing idea. But is it too simple? We know that Neanderthal brains were larger than ours and even when we factor that larger portions were dedicated to sight and to managing a larger body build and musculature, we can’t deny that they looked a lot like us and that any theory about their brain would seem closer to the mark if it afforded a more complex analysis of cerebral functioning—even if different—that we grant ourselves when analyzing our own brains.

But I think here is the root of why so many of us romanticize Neanderthals: They are so very like us and many of us carry a bit of them within, and yet, they made different choices and were so different, too. As we look around our complicated world, complicated because of our exceedingly capable ability to manipulate our environment and communicate it to each other both face-to-face and to future generations, I think many of us actually long for a simpler life when we gathered around a fire as meat roasted and someone shared a story, whether through complex vocabulary or grunts and gestures. I think this especially as I look around and see so many people bending their visual and cognitive skills to little handheld devices while missing a stop sign or sidewalk curb.

Neanderthals, who lived from around 350,000 to 30,000 years ago, had a good long run of some 320,000 years. Anatomically modern humans have been around only for around 160,000 years. It is eminently clear that our choices made with our run-with-it-symbolically-oriented brains may very well determine if we will manage to live as long as Neanderthals did, an eye opening thought just in time to see the curb.

          

A Peaceable Kingdom, On Pilgrimage in Rioja, Spain

I recall one day of walking the Way of Saint James, the Camino. When I got to Nájera, just west of Logroño in the Rioja wine region of northern Spain, it was an overcast day and I was hungry. But first, before it closed at midday, I wanted to visit the place of legend and myth that put Nájera on the map, and probably made it one of the important stops on the pilgrimage, the cave where Mary and Jesus appeared with two birds in AD 1044.

I walked toward the  red sandstone cliff that guards one side of this riverside town, where I knew I would find the Monasterio de Santa María la Real embedded into the natural stone wall. I reviewed the details of the legend in my head as I walked, wanting to retrace events as they are described.

It goes like this. One day in AD 1044, the Navarrese King García III was out riding and hunting with his falcon. The falcon suddenly flew after a partridge and both birds disappeared into a thick growth of trees.

The king dismounted and went into the trees to see what had happened to them. He found himself standing in front of a hidden cave. More unusual, an ethereal light poured out. He entered the cave and followed the light. At its source, he saw the falcon and the partridge sitting peacefully on either side of Mary, with the baby Jesus seated on her lap. In front of the celestial pair were lilies and a bell. 

King García never forgot this stunning vision and in AD 1056 he founded the monastery of Santa María la Real around and incorporating the cave. Today when you visit, you can visit the cave by passing through the church to the back wall that is still the natural cave.

The original cave was most likely carved out of the soft stone around the 3^rd century, both for living as well as for defense. It was then forgotten, overgrown by forest and hidden, until that fateful day with the clever falcon in the 11^th century.

Having fed the mystical hunger, it was time to feed my growling stomach before continuing the pilgrimage. I discovered that Nájera is a very warm and welcoming town. I went into a café that called to me, either for its beautiful riverside setting, or for the welcoming patron and clientele, or, just maybe, for the array of tapas splayed on the long wooden counter.

There I discovered another miracle, of the culinary kind: a little open-faced sandwich where the bread had been brushed and toasted with olive oil and then layered with roasted red pepper, thin slices of cured ham, jamón Serrano, and topped with a little fried quail’s egg.  Doubtless this exquisite tapa was paying homage to its cousin the peace-making partridge in the holy cave. 

Content and sated, I continued on, but doing as I do, walking in my own way. First, there was a detour to San Millán de la Cogolla, just south, and one back to Logroño (by bus) to visit yet another pilgrim’s detour at the Cistercian convent of Santa María de Cañas, just north. I also contemplated how many fine holy sites and pilgrim detours there were here in Spain’s most famous wine region. I think the two have something to do with each other.

If the deeper stories and legends of the Camino interest you, please check out my new app—both on iTunes and Android—The Esoteric Camino France & Spain.

Wishing you un buen Camino, un bon Chemin, and a good Road.

On the Chemin Looking for Wild Boar

One day in the middle of our two and a half week trek on the Chemin de St-Jacques, the Way of St. James through southwestern France this autumn, my friend, Sarah, and I really wanted to see our first wild boar, the famous black sanglier of the Pyrenees.   

That day, taking lunch in the middle of a corn field in the Béarn, we heard the distant snorting surely of the wild Pyreneen sanglier. We were certain that there were at least two or three of them in the middle of a corn field to our right. We quietly packed up our picnic and we walked stealthily toward the sound so as not to disturb them. We turned the bend and into a clearing. Many snorts greeted us. 

We discovered we were on the edge of a pig farm in the middle of the corn fields. 

Alas, the angels laughed hard (at our expense) that day.

Mary Magdalene's Feast Day from Llanes to Vézelay

Today honors the energy of the divine and feminine grace of Mary Magdalene. Having just come from making the pilgrimage to Vézelay in Burgundy, France, where her basilica honors the highest point of that ancient Gallo-Roman hilltop village, I am even more appreciative of her beauty.

This spring I hiked to Vézelay from Avallon on a day that was threatening heavy rain throughout. As much as I love to hike into wild and unknown territory, I resisted starting. I resisted and resisted and then I knew deep down that if I let the rain stop me, I would regret it for the rest of my life. I forged forward through my resistance. 

As soon as I set one foot before the other—finding my way down the steep fortified hillside of Avallon toward the Cousin river and into the Morvan forest—that magic took hold that every pilgrim knows: The road began to show me signs and my way was clear, one step at a time. Prior rains had washed out parts of the trail. I lost it. I found it. I lost it again, but always found it again. Song birds punctuated my triumphs, my mind taking their song as a victory dance. White Burgundian cows munching on lemon yellow mustard flowers sauntered over to greet me, making me pause to see where to pick up the trail across the field. Once, was that a snake that slithered loudly to the right, making me notice the trail marker I'd missed painted on a leaf-covered rock? Even the threatening weather ceased. Grace punctuated every turn, no matter how trying some turns were. The expected heavy rains did not arrive. The storm clouds literally parted and dramatic striated rays of sun shined through.

It took eight hours through the forest and the rising and falling vine and mustard covered hills of Burgundy to arrive in Vézelay. First, the hill appeared, the highest in the vicinity, and grew as I walked. Then, the towers of the basilica became apparent. Finally, the scorpion shape of the hill—as one book described it—upon which the church sat revealed the pathway from the scorpion's tail at the foot to its crowning head at the top. The pilgrim’s path to the basilica was like walking along a rising spine, some ancient kundalini that the stonemasons and monks must have known implicitly.

And when I finally entered into the nave of striated light-play from the high arches of bicolored stone, Vespers was about to begin. Sound and light in perfect harmony swirled up and down the basilica and entered into the crown of my head. 

An active monastic community of nuns and monks live in Vézelay and carry on the sacred traditions within this medieval Romanesque church dedicated to this Lady of Grace. Her crypt is beneath the nave, built of the stone carved out of the hill. The small chamber allows visitors to sit and meditate undisturbed. 

The strongest feeling, one that recurred each time I entered the basilica, was balance. It is a place of harmony and balance, between male and female, heaven and earth, god and mortal, sound and light.

Another church that I love, that is also dedicated to Mary Magdalene, is in the heart of the fishing town of Llanes, along the northern Spanish coast in Asturias. On a smaller but no less powerful scale, it also offers the experience of harmony and balance. 

Here, I love how this photo of its altar captured a fleeting streak of light.

To read more about Llanes and the surviving expressions of the ancient feminine divine that holds foot in northern Spain, as well as into southern France, the fabled territory where Mary Magdalene may have lived during her later years, please read my piece for Perceptive Travel, The Goddess Still Lives Here and also see my book, The Spiritual Traveler Spain.