Following the Sun (8 page)

Solar fanatic that I am, I could not help but notice that the golden halo fixed at the back of her head glinted and gleamed in the light, very like the sun.

Mary was the virgin mother, the descendant, we are told by the mythologists who study this sort of thing, of the ancient goddess of the earth, not quite banished to obscurity by the male gods Zeus and Jehovah. But although she may be an earth mother, the Magna Mater of the old paleoreligions of the Iberian peninsula, her most resplendent feature, and one that characterizes the Virgin and her child and all the Christian saints, is that golden halo of sunlight, an ancient remembrance of the source of all religions.

None of this is surprising. Spain, although one of the most Christian nations on earth, retains some of the most primitive elements of the old primordial pagan religions, filled as it is with sacred processions, in the style of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the Panathenaean processions to the Parthenon and Bacchanalian celebrations in the form of the
Feria
, which follows on the heels of Easter.

When I first came to Europe, out of the cold strictures of the Protestant north, I landed in Algeciras, and somehow, quite by accident as I recall, ended up in Seville in the middle of the
Feria
celebrations. I was nineteen years old and not unfamiliar with wild parties, but this was a party that began at dusk and went on all night, and every subsequent night for the next ten days. The event rivals, maybe even surpasses, some of the great festivals on earth—the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio, and the Palio in Siena.

Feria
begins, as did many of the exuberant celebrations of the pagan world, with the sacrifice of a bull toward dusk on the holiest of the holy days in the Christian year, Easter. The Sunday
corrida
before
Feria
is the command performance for Sevillian society. The women don their prized antique
mantillas
and traditional spotted and frilled dresses, lay on much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and brandish elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and a restless air of excitement spins through the stands. The major-domos arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville
corrida
as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero
fincas
. Water men circulate with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater hawking red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bullfight favorites, such as “El Gato Montes.”

Then, into the center of the arena, stride the gladiators, dressed for the occasion in their bright, solar-inspired “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses bearing the high-speared
picadores
, and as the band plays the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades.

Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a tension settles over the crowd. Silence descends and waits like a crouched cat. Suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, with his great spearpoint swinging horns, his shiny coat and his gleaming bright hoofs. He halts in mid arena, paws the sand, his eyes searching, his enormous horned head turning left to right, looking for the enemy that has trapped him in the small corral over the past few days. He trots around the ring, sniffing the air, pawing and snorting, and then, as bulls will do, he selects an area of the open space, his so-called
querencia
, or favored site, which he will defend to the death.

Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. The altar boys, or arena workers, scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed
banderilleros
and the horsed
picadores
, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls, steps out.

He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight-backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerinalike killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who charges down on him again and again, his head lowered to better hook his opponent. Having tested his victim, the
matador
priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The
banderilleros
jab colorful barbed darts in his shoulders, ducking and dodging his flashing horns as they do so. Then the horse-borne
picadores
lance the bull's neck muscles as he charges repeatedly into the sides of the padded horses, occasionally lifting them off their feet. Finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until, standing sideways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest shakes the
muleta
and the bull charges in for the last time.

The
matadores
, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The dark, bloodied Minotaur staggers, sways, and collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon.

The crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the
matador
struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and exits, his work completed.

Little wonder that this primitive rite has been the subject of much literature.

The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it's indefensible. But in my callow youth, caught up as I was, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and primal gods and goddesses, I perceived the bullfight in historical terms. As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to those of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures, this one was somewhat balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.

It is argued that the Spanish
corrida
evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early twentieth century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with bull worship and one of the rituals of this veneration involved a dangerous dance in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull's back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed the ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers that he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the latest explanation, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray, is that the bull images in the palace of Knossos are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull-leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda, who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.

According to MacGillivray, the configuration of stars depicted on the wall paintings would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. The recurring image in Cretan art of two steep peaks, which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull, was a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivray argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and that, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax,
labros
) symbolizes, according to MacGillivray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles, represents the equality of day and night.

Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster's mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars, astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.

This view fit nicely with theories that related the early depictions of spirals and mazes engraved on cave walls and on Neolithic stone artifacts to the passage of the sun as it spiraled around the earth during the four seasons.

The bull fight is only one of the Spanish Easter rituals that evolved out of ancient traditions. Although the official date for the celebration of Easter was set by the Christian church in the ninth century, the early festivals associated with the Resurrection previously took place at the time of the vernal equinox and were tied to pagan fertility and agricultural rites. Among the ancient Greeks, the first day of spring was connected with the cults of Adonis and his Phrygian counterpart, Attis. The beautiful boy child Adonis was loved by both Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Zeus resolved the conflict by decreeing that Adonis should spend winter in the underworld and summer above ground with Aphrodite.

His Eastern counterpart, Attis, was a young shepherd boy beloved by Cybele, the Magna Mater, or Mother of the Gods, the greatest of the Asiatic goddesses of fertility. Like Jesus, Attis had a miraculous virgin birth. Both Attis and Adonis died young. Adonis was killed by a wild boar, and in some versions of the myth Attis castrated himself and bled to death beneath a pine tree. The tree became his symbol and was brought out during his festival day on the twenty-second of March. In Greece the death of Adonis was commemorated on earth by the blood-red windflower or scarlet anemone, which sprang up from the earth in those places where the drops of his blood had fallen.

Both Adonis and Attis are reborn each spring and their death and resurrection were celebrated in Greece and later in Rome in a mixture of mourning and festivity. Waxen images of Adonis or Attis were paraded through the streets, accompanied by music and cymbals and singing. In Rome the cults of Attis and the followers of his goddess lover Cybele developed ecstatic processions in which celebrants danced wildly through the streets, working themselves into a bloody frenzy of lamentation. Priests of the Attis cults sometimes castrated themselves during these frenzied processions.

The early Christians adapted the Adonis rites to the Easter celebrations of the resurrected Christ. Waxen images of the dead Christ were brought out from the churches and carried along the streets in elaborate, festive processions. In the early centuries of Christianity in Rome the coincidence of the resurrection of the gods, Christ, Attis, and Adonis, was a matter of great debate, with the pagans accusing the Christians of imitating the miraculous resurrection of the vegetative gods Adonis and Attis, and the Christians contending that the pagan rites were a mockery of the true faith. But both Easter and the Adonis cults have even deeper roots.

Two of the earliest historically recorded deities, the Babylonian fertility god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar, were closely connected to the solar year and the seasonal cycles. In the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, Tammuz died each year in autumn, and all the vegetation died with him. The lamentation of his lover Ishtar, the goddess of fertility and life, who was associated with the cycles of the moon, brought him back to earth in the spring; the flowers bloomed, the birds returned, and life appeared once more out of the dead land.

In fact much of this probably predates even Sumeria and may have taken place in prehistory at the very dawn of agriculture. The seed is buried in the cold earth, and around the time of the vernal equinox, in what must have seemed sheer miracle, the green shoots of life sprang up from the dead soils, fostered by the warming rays of the spring sun. No wonder there was cause for celebration.

The ritual Easter day slaughter of the bulls in Seville marks the beginning of the ten-day party of
Feria
. But since I had been before, I decided to leave Seville and spend Easter someplace else. I said goodbye to mother Anna, who wrapped me in her arms and rocked me from side to side and made me promise to return, and rode out through the rolling hills and fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir River toward the town of Lora del Río on my way to Córdoba.

Near the town of Alcalá I hit one of those terrible cobbled roads that nearly rattled my poor old Peugeot to death—one of the problems occasionally associated with travel on back roads, although far better than the major trunk roads with their storms of truck traffic. Toward dusk, I saw ahead of me the spiky turret of the Church of the Assumption towering over Lora del Río, and found, to my surprise, a good hotel on the town plaza. That evening a crowd gathered in the plaza below my hotel window and I went out on the balcony to see what was happening. On a balcony just opposite my room a woman in traditional dress stepped out. The doors of the church swung open and a statue of the suffering Virgin, all decked in silk and jewels, moved out to the street as the crowd hushed. The woman extended her arms toward the Virgin and then split the air with the most piercing, haunting
saeta
I had ever heard. The arrow of the song darted through the air toward the float and pierced the heart of the Holy Mother, and when the song was finished the crowd was too moved to applaud.