The Pilgrimage

  The High Priest sprinkled water over us without stepping into the circle. Then, with the sacred ink, he wrote in the earth the seventy-two names by which God is known within the Tradition.

  All of us--pilgrims and Knights--began to recite the sacred names. The flames of the torches crackled, a sign that the spirit that had been invoked had surrendered.

  The moment for the dance had arrived. I knew how to participate because Petrus had taught me on the previous day; it was a different dance from the one I was used to performing at this stage during similar rituals.

  No rule was stated, but all of us already knew what it was: no initiate could step outside the protective circle, since we lacked the protection that the Knights had with their suits of mail. I visualized the size of the circle and did exactly as Petrus had taught me.

  I thought back to my infancy. A voice, the far-off voice of a woman within me, began to sing a simple melody. I knelt and compressed myself into the seed position and felt that my breast--only my breast--was beginning to dance. I felt at ease, able to enter completely into the ritual of the Tradition. The music within me began to change; my movements became more pronounced, and I entered into a powerful state of ecstasy. Everything around me was darkened, and my body, surrounded by that darkness, felt weightless. I saw myself walking through the flowered fields of Aghata, where I met my grandmother and an uncle who had been important to me when I was a child. I felt the vibration of time in its grid of quadrants, where all roads are joined and mixed, becoming identical despite their being so different from each other. At one point, I saw the Australian flash by me: his body was suffused in a red glow.

  The image that followed was of a chalice and paten, and this image lasted for a long time, as if it had a special importance for me. I tried to understand its significance, but nothing came to me, despite my conviction that it had something to do with my sword. Then, after the chalice and paten had vanished, I saw the face of RAM coming toward me out of the darkness. But when the face came closer, it was only the face of N., the spirit that had been invoked, who was well known to me. We did not establish any special kind of communication, and his face dissolved into the darkness that was fluctuating around me.

  I don't know how long we continued to dance. But suddenly I heard a voice:

  "YAHWEH, TETRAGRAMMATON..." and I didn't want to emerge from my trance, but the voice insisted:

  "YAHWEH, TETRAGRAMMATON..." and I recognized the voice of the High Priest, calling upon everyone to come out of the trance. It irritated me. The Tradition was where I was rooted, and I did not want to come back. But the Master demanded it:

  "YAHWEH, TETRAGRAMMATON..."

  I couldn't maintain the trance. Resentfully, I returned to earth. I was once again within the magic circle there in the ancestral ambiance of the Castle of the Templars.

  We pilgrims looked at each other. The sudden interruption seemed to have displeased everyone. I felt a strong urge to tell the Australian that I had seen him in my trance. But when I looked over at him, I saw that it wasn't necessary: he had seen me, too.

  The Knights came to us and surrounded us. They began to beat upon their shields with their hands, making a noise that was deafening. Then the High Priest spoke:

  "O Spirit N., because thou so diligently responded to my requests, with all due solemnity I allow thee to depart, without injury to man or beast. Go, I command thee, and be ready and anxious to return whenever thou art duly exorcised and conjured by the sacred rites of the Tradition. I conjure thee to go, peacefully and quietly, and may God's peace continue ever to be with thee and me. Amen."

  The circle was erased, and we knelt with our heads bowed. A Knight said seven Paternosters and seven Ave Marias with us. The High Priest added seven repetitions of the Apostles' Creed, stating that Our Lady of Medjugorje--whose visitations had been noted in Yugoslavia ever since 1982--had indicated that he should do this. And then we began another of the Christian rituals.

  "Andrew, rise and come before me," said the High Priest. The Australian approached the altar, where the seven Knights were standing.

  One of the Knights--the one who must have been his guide--spoke:

  "Brother, dost thou demand the company of the House?"

  "Yes," answered the Australian. And then I understood which of the Christian rituals we were witnessing: the initiation of a Templar.

  "Dost thou understand the great severities of the House and its charitable orders?"

  "I am ready to support all of them, in God's name, and I desire to be a servant and slave of the House forever, through all the days of my life," answered the Australian.

  There followed a series of ritual questions, some of which made no sense in today's world; others were concerned with profound devotion and love. Andrew, with his head bowed, responded to all of them.

  "Distinguished brother, thou art asking a great thing of me. But thou art seeing only the outer layer of our religion--the beautiful horses and the elegant vestments," said his guide. "But thou knowest not the hard demands made here within: it will be difficult for thee, who art master of thyself, to serve others; rarely wilt thou be able to do as thou wishest. If thou desirest that thou be here, thou wilt be sent beyond the sea, and if thou desirest that thou be in Acre, thou wilt be sent to Tripoli, or Antioch, or Armenia. And when thou desirest sleep, thou wilt be told to stand guard, and when thou wantest to stand guard, thou wilt be told to sleep in thy bed."

  "I desire to enter the House," answered the Australian. It felt as if all of the Templars who had ever lived in the castle were happily attending the initiation ceremony; the torches were crackling in earnest.

  Several admonishments followed, and the Australian answered them all by saying that he wanted to enter the House. Finally, his guide turned to the High Priest and repeated all of the answers the Australian had made. The High Priest solemnly asked once more if he was ready to accept all of the rules of the House.

  "Yes, Master, God willing. I come before God, before thee, and before the brothers, and I implore and solicit thee, before God and Our Lady, to take me into thy company and into the favors of the House, spiritually and temporally, as one who desires to be servant and slave of the House from now on, for all the days of his life."

  "I bid you enter, by God's love," said the High Priest.

  With that, all of the Knights unsheathed their swords and pointed them toward heaven. Then they lowered the blades and made of them a crown of steel around Andrew's head. The flames created a golden reflection on the blades, consecrating the moment.

  Solemnly his Master came to him. And he gave him his sword.

  Someone began to toll a bell, and its notes echoed off the walls of the ancient castle, infinitely repeating themselves. We all bowed our heads, and the Knights disappeared from view. When we looked up, we were only ten; the Australian had left to join the Knights in the ritual banquet.

  We changed back into our street clothes and said our good-byes without any further formalities. The dance must have lasted for a long time, because the day was brightening. An immense loneliness invaded my soul.

  I was envious of the Australian, who had recovered his sword and had reached the end of his quest. Now I was alone, with no one to guide me; the Tradition--in a distant country in South America--had expelled me without showing me the road back. And I had to continue to walk the Strange Road to Santiago, which was now coming to an end, without knowing the secret of my sword or how to find it.

  The bell continued to toll. As I left the castle, with dawn breaking, I noticed that it was the bell of a nearby church, calling the faithful to the first mass of the day. The people of the city were awakening to their work and their unpaid bills, their love affairs and their dreams. But they didn't know that, on the previous night, an ancestral rite had once again taken place, that what had been thought of as dead and gone for centuries had once again been celebrated, and that it continued to demonstrate its awesome power.

  El Cebrero


  "ARE YOU A PILGRIM?" ASKED THE LITTLE GIRL. SHE WAS the only person in sight on that blazing afternoon in Villafranca del Bierzo.

  I looked at her but didn't answer. She was about eight and poorly dressed. She had run to the fountain where I had sat down to rest.

  My only concern now was to get to Santiago de Compostela as quickly as possible and put an end to this crazy adventure. I had not been able to forget the sadness in Petrus's voice at the train yard nor the way he had looked at me from a distance when I had met his gaze during the ritual of the Tradition. It was as if all of the effort he had made in helping me had led to nothing. When the Australian had been called to the altar, I was sure that Petrus would have preferred that it had been I who had been called. My sword might very well be hidden in that castle, the repository of legends and ancient wisdom. It was a place that fit perfectly with all of my deductions: deserted, visited only by a few pilgrims who respected the relics of the Order of the Templars, and located on sacred ground.

  But only the Australian had been called to the altar. And Petrus must have felt humiliated in the presence of the others because, as a guide, he had not been capable of leading me to my sword.

  Besides this, the ritual of the Tradition had aroused in me again a bit of my fascination with occult wisdom, most of which I had forgotten about as I made my way along the Strange Road to Santiago, the Road of the common people. The invocations, the absolute control over the material, the communication with other worlds--all of that was much more interesting to me than the RAM practices. But perhaps the practices had a more objective application in my life; there was no doubt that I had changed a lot since I had begun to walk the Strange Road to Santiago. Thanks to Petrus's help, I had learned that I could pass through waterfalls, win out over enemies, and converse with my messenger about practical matters. I had seen the face of my death and the blue sphere of the love that consumes and floods the entire world. I was ready to fight the good fight and turn my life into a series of triumphs.

  Yet a hidden part of me was still nostalgic for the magic circles, the transcendental formulas, the incense, and the sacred ink. The ceremony that Petrus had called an "homage to the ancients" had been for me an intense and healthful encounter with old, forgotten lessons. And the possibility that I might never again have access to that world discouraged me from wanting to go on.

  When I had returned to my hotel after the ritual of the Tradition, there in my box, along with my key, was a copy of The Pilgrim's Guide. This was a book that Petrus had utilized for orientation when the yellow markers were hard to find; it had helped us to calculate the distances between cities. I left Ponferrada that same morning, without having slept, and went out on the Road. By that afternoon, I had discovered that the map was not drawn to scale, and that I had to spend a night out in the open, in a cave in the cliffs.

  There, as I meditated on everything that had happened to me since my meeting with Mme Lourdes, I thought about the relentless effort Petrus had made to help me understand that contrary to what we had always been taught, results were what counted. One's efforts are salutary and indispensable, but without results, they amount to nothing. And now the only result that I demanded of myself, the only reward for everything I had been through, was to find my sword. That had not happened yet, and Santiago was only a few days away.

  "If you are a pilgrim, I can take you to the Gates of Forgiveness," insisted the girl at the fountain in Villafranca del Bierzo. "Whoever passes through those gates need not go all the way to Santiago."

  I held out some pesetas to her so that she would go away and leave me alone. But instead she began to splash the water in the fountain, wetting my knapsack and my shorts.

  "Come on, come on," she said again. At that moment, I was thinking about one of Petrus's repeated quotations: "He that ploweth should plow in hope. He that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope." It was from one of the letters of the apostle Paul.

  I had to persevere for a little longer, to continue searching until the end, without being fearful of defeat, to keep alive the hope of finding my sword and understanding its secret.

  And--who knows?--was this little girl trying to tell me something that I didn't want to understand? If the Gates of Forgiveness, which were part of a church, had the same spiritual effect as arriving at Santiago, why couldn't my sword be there?

  "Let's go," I said to the child. I looked at the mountain that I had just descended; I was going to have to climb part of it again. I had passed by the Gates of Forgiveness with no desire to go to them, since my only goal was to get to Santiago. Now, here was a little girl, the only human being present there on that hot afternoon, insisting that I go back and see something I had decided to ignore. After all, why hadn't that little girl gone away after I had given her some money? Could it be that, in my discouragement and haste, I had walked right past my objective without recognizing it?

  Petrus had always said that I liked to fantasize too much about things. But perhaps he was wrong.

  As I walked along with the girl, I was remembering the story of the Gates of Forgiveness. They represented a kind of "arrangement" that the Church had made for pilgrims who fell sick. From that point on, the Road became once again difficult and mountainous all the way to Compostela, so during the twelfth century, one of the popes had said that whoever was unable to go further had only to pass through the Gates of Forgiveness to receive the same indulgences as the pilgrims who made it to the end of the Road. With one magic gesture, that pope had resolved the problem posed by the mountains and had inspired an increased number of pilgrimages.

  We climbed, following the same route I had traveled earlier in the day: twisting roads, slippery and steep. The girl led, moving along very quickly, and many times I had to ask that she go more slowly. She would do so for a while and then, losing her sense of pace, would begin to run again. Half an hour later, and after much grumbling on my part, we reached the Gates of Forgiveness.

  "I have the key to the church," she said. "I will go in and open the gates so you can pass through them."

  She went in through the main entrance, and I waited outside. It was a small church, and the gates opened to the north. The door frame was decorated with scallop shells and scenes from the life of San Tiago. As I heard the sound of the key in the lock, an immense German shepherd, appearing out of nowhere, came up to me and stood between the portal and me.

  I was immediately prepared for a fight. "Not again," I thought. "Is this story never going to end? Nothing but more and more tests, battles, and humiliations--and still no clue about my sword."

  At that moment, though, the Gates of Forgiveness swung open, and the girl appeared. When she saw that the dog was watching me--and that my eyes were already fixed on his--she said some affectionate words to him, and the dog relaxed. Wagging his tail, he followed her toward the back of the church.

  Maybe Petrus was right. Maybe I did like to fantasize about things. A simple German shepherd had been transformed in my mind into a threatening supernatural being. That was a bad sign--a sign of the fatigue that leads to defeat.

  But there was still hope. The girl signaled to me to enter. With my heart full of expectation, I passed through the Gates of Forgiveness, thereby receiving the same indulgences as the pilgrims who went all the way to Santiago.

  My gaze swept over the empty, undecorated church, seeking the only thing I cared about.

  "At the top of all the columns you can see shells. The shell is the symbol of the Road," began the girl. "This is Santa Agueda of..."

  Before long, I could see that it had been useless to come all the way back to this church.

  "And this is San Tiago Matamoros, brandishing his sword. You can see dead Moors under his horse's hooves. This statue was made in..."

  San Tiago's sword was there but not mine. I offered a few more pesetas to the girl, but she would not accept them. A bit offended, she ended her explanations about the church and asked me to leave.

  Once again I wa
lked down the mountain and resumed my pilgrimage toward Compostela. As I passed through Villafranca del Bierzo for the second time, a man approached me. He said that his name was Angel and asked if I would be interested in seeing the Church of Saint Joseph the Carpenter. The man's name gave me hope, but I had just been disappointed, and I was beginning to see that Petrus was an expert observer of behavior. People do have a tendency to fantasize about things that do not even exist, while they fail to learn the lessons that are before their very eyes.

  But perhaps just to confirm this tendency one more time, I allowed myself to be led by Angel to this other church. It was closed, and he did not have a key. He pointed to the framework of the entrance with its carving of Saint Joseph, his carpentry tools close alongside him. I nodded, thanked him, and offered him some pesetas. He refused them and left me there in the middle of the street--but not before saying, "We are proud of our city. It is not for money that we do this."

  I returned to the Road and in fifteen minutes had left Villafranca del Bierzo behind--Villafranca del Bierzo, with its doors, its streets, and its mysterious guides who asked nothing in exchange for their services.

  I walked for some time through mountainous terrain; my progress was slow and demanding. As I started out, I thought only about my previous worries--solitude, shame at having disappointed Petrus, my sword and its secret. But soon the images of the little girl and of Angel began insistently to come to mind. While I had been focusing only on what I would gain, they had done the best for me that they could. And they had asked for nothing in return. A vague idea began to surface from deep inside me. It was some sort of link among all the things I was thinking about. Petrus had always insisted that the expectation of reward was absolutely necessary to the achievement of victory. Yet every time that I forgot about the rest of the world and began to think only about my sword, he forced me, through his painful lessons, to return to reality. This was a sequence that had occurred repeatedly during our time together on the Road.