Be there with bells shells on

Conques as seen from St. Roch Chapel

Conques is a little village in the Aveyron whose greatest claims to fame are the relics of Sainte Foy and the monastery which grew wealthy around them.  This is a tiny town, yet it boasts a large and magnificent basilica in the Romanesque style, well-maintained and in a context so picturesque you may begin to wonder where the film crew is hiding.  In French -- as in English -- the word conque means shell and is descended from the Latin concha.  I giggle at this because in Argentina the concha refers to the female genitalia. My wife says it all the time when she's pissed off at say, an olive jar she can't open: "¡La concha de la lora!" Which literally means "The (female) parrot's shell!" but really means "Cunt of a whore!"  It's used where an American might say "God fucking damn it!" or some such.  Why not?

The metaphor is more clear when seen

When you see a conch, with its flesh tones and here smooth/there bumpy texture, not to mention the overall form, it's clear from whence the metaphor arrives.  Shell metaphors are not entirely lost in English, either: surely you've heard of the bearded clam?  It's not strictly feminine, for that matter.  A pair of masculine accouterments, depending on the region, can be referred to as "mountain oysters."  Curiously, there actually is a Modiolus barbatus, or "bearded mussel."  It is also known as the "horse mussel" or (getting so clever here) the "bearded horse mussel."  In any event, this isn't some term of modern perversion; the shell's connection with the vajayjay is of ancient provenance.

According to legend, Conques (Concas in Occitan) was named by its founder, a hermit named Dadon, who thought that the hills encircling the village resembled a shell.  Being a hermit, he may have been, uh, lonely.  Whether or not the origin story is true or not is beside the point. Maybe it does resemble a shell, which might partially account for why the area holds a special place in the hearts of pilgrims along the Saint James Way, which passes directly through the village. The symbol of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage is the shell. I recall a lecture in which the professor described the shell as a representation of the journey of the human soul; in this interpretation the road to Compostela would also be the journey of one's soul towards a state of plenary forgiveness, perfection and paradise.  It is more than metaphor, because in Roman Catholic doctrine, making this pilgrimage did in fact earn the pilgrim total absolution from his or her sins.

The magnificent reliquary of Sainte Foy

Dadon came to this wild place at the end of the 8th century but apparently didn't stay long.  Perhaps he left after he was joined by a group of Benedictines; it certainly would have messed with his plan to lead the hermit's life.  These monks founded the monastery which still exists today. 

The monastery would have probably drifted into obscurity if not for Sainte Foy. In 866 her relics were brought here from Auch in what has been called a "furtive translation"; stolen, in other words.  Once ensconced in Concas, the relics and the monastery soon came under the protection of the Carolingian monarchs.

St. Roch showin' some leg

At first, Conques was a local attraction, but over time it developed into an important destination for regional pilgrims; in the 11th century Conques became an important stopping point along the Saint James Way as well.  During the same period the village was becoming a monastic center of the highest importance, a status attested to by the quantity and quality of the cult objects in its treasury.  Conques is today a tiny village of less than 300 permanent residents but it still has the single largest collection of goldsmithery in France.  These relics are not just museum pieces; they are still used in religious processions and services.  The reliquary of Saint Foy in majesty is an important example of the style and iconography of the Romanesque and typifies images of the Virgin dating from this period, including contemporary and later "Vierges Noires" or Black Madonnas.

Pilgrims coming to Conques from long distances, even from beyond the Pyrénées, were first recorded in the mid 11th-century; this is an example of the growing popularity of pilgrimages which turned many local shrines into centers of international importance.  It was also in the 11th century that a kind of "cult of femininity" developed in the song and poetry of the the Troubadours and the theology of the Church. (See LoS: Women)  In addition to Pilgrims, the Way was also a major route for the Troubadours, whose voyages did much to spread the notion of courtly love, the cult of the Virgin, and the cults of obscure saints such as Sernin, Liberata, Quitteria, etc.  The patron of the Saint James Way is male -- St. Roch -- but the shell which serves as the Way's "logo" is a female symbol.  As a metaphor for the vagina, the shell evokes (among other things) maternity, sexual desire and original sin. 

The cult of the Virgin took off in the Romanesque period.  Hitherto a background presence, Mary rather abruptly swung into place as a central figure in the Christian narrative, a place she still occupies in Catholic France today (See LoS: The Virgin and the Cross).  Both in hymns and iconography, she changed from a distant and ethereal figure into something more earthy. Laced with liberal doses of conscious and unconscious sexual desire, worship of the Virgin was also inexorably linked with feminine concerns; praying for her aid in childbirth was common, and her symbolism at this time -- e.g. her foot crushing the serpent -- was an evocation of her perpetual Virginity, her exception from the pains of childbirth and the expiation of original sin.  The evolution of the Virgin into a more intimate and "earthy" interlocutor was almost certainly due to the influence of St. Bernard, a towering figure in the Medieval Church, both in theology and concrete affairs.  He wrote the Templar Rule and was instrumental in creating what would become Christendom's most powerful order; he whipped up internal pogroms against Cathar/Albigensian/Bogomil heretics and preached the Second Crusade against Islam.  He was instrumental in drumming up support for Pope Innocent during the schism beginning in 1130.  One of his disciples became Pope Eugenius III.  He was also one of the founders of the renewed Cistercian order.  A big deal to be sure.

The tympanum of the Basilica of Sainte Foy

The pilgrims' patron, St. Roch, is recognizable by a plague sore or wound on his inner thigh, a kind of gash that never heals, which bleeds but never bleeds out. Roch is often pictured daintily lifting his garment to reveal this wound.

Roch was said to have born to a mother who'd been barren until she prayed to the Virgin. When he caught the plague, he retired to live in a forest, where his dog helped him to heal by licking his wounds.  In the forest he was sustained by a miraculous spring. Miraculous springs are all over Marial legends, a survival perhaps of Celtic traditions:  sacred groves, springs and high places are associated with any local Virgin of note.  LoS has recounted numerous examples of such springs associated with:  the Virgin; many obscure saints such as the aforementioned Quitteria and Liberata, (sisters and Virgin Martyrs of the distant pagan past whose cult stretches from Aquitaine to northern Portugal -- essentially along the St. James Way); and even male saints such as St. Fris, who also exhibits many of the characteristics of the Virgin. Upon his death, St. Fris' body was swallowed up by a rock; when it was later re-discovered, a miraculous spring appeared from within the rock.  The body was incorrupt.

This echoes the story of St. James.  When brought ashore in Iberia, a massive rock closed around his relics; this rock was then taken to Compostela.

One of the seven sisters of Quitteria and Liberata (there were nine in total) was named Euphemia, or Eumelia.  Cornered by pursuing Roman soldiers, she threw herself from a cliff to avoid capture.  Where she fell, the rocks opened and swallowed her whole; a spring immediately appeared on the spot.

Picturesque, you say?

I've had occasion to write about "the Milky Way" before; I'll here reiterate that, like Rome, Compostela held significance way before the Christians adopted it. The pilgrimage to Compostela was a Celtic tradition that symbolized the journey of the soul from birth until death, following the sun until it sank into the sea at the end of the known earth. Unlike today, the Celtic pilgrimage did not end in the city itself, but at the beach and into the very ocean -- following the Sun towards death as it disappeared beyond the horizon at a significant westerly point. Perhaps this ocean terminus is why the shell is the Camino's symbol -- the journey is the destination. As previously stated, the medieval mind, attuned to a more visual language as opposed to the written word, recognized the shell to represent the soul's journey through life. Think of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"; the goddess is being birthed from the waters riding a shell. The goddess of erotic love is here a bit demure, but she surfs a giant shell, a vagina basically; "con" in French is the rather commonplace translation of the English "cunt". The root of course the same as concha. So it's not just the Argentines who make the link between the shell and the female sex. It's found in the Latin roots.

The basilica today

A small tower at the cemetery is marked with this pair of circles inscribed with a star.  I took a compass reading and it's not oriented towards any of the cardinal points. 

Ostensibly, the cult at Conques is centered around Sainte Foy, a.k.a. Santa Fe, a.k.a. Saint Faith. Faith personified. Faith was first associated with the city of Agen, where she was martyred during the reign of Diocletian for refusing to sacrifice to Pagan gods.  This was said to have occurred in the 3rd century. In the 9th century a monk stole her relics and brought them here. Legend has it that where he fell, exhausted, he struck his staff upon the ground and the water broke: a spring sprang and he survived. Today a small chapel stands at this spot.  The sexual imagery is inescapable. A man wields a phallic staff and, driving it into the ground, causes life-giving waters to erupt from "mother" earth. 

St. Fris is said to have created a spring when he planted his standard in the ground.  His cult, which is highly localized in the Gers and almost unknown outside a few scattered places, developed around the same time as that of Saint Faith, that is to say when the nameless monk stole her relics.  Fris, Roch, Sainte Foy, the Virgin, all associated with healing waters.  Even today, the Pyrénées are dotted with towns built around thermal spring; cures effected at these spas are reimbursable by the national health insurance.  No coincidence then that Lourdes, another Pyrénéen town, one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in Catholicism -- is based around its healing waters.  The modern pilgrim still honors these saints by carrying symbols of the masculine and feminine powers and the sexual union behind the miracle of life, as well as the source of the sin he or she is trying to expiate:  the modern pilgrim carries a staff, to which they usually attach a shell.  All in the name of the Holy Faith.

----

And I was going to do more with this when I began months ago but its been sitting around as a draft for so long I'm just gonna ding the bell and hand it off to the runner who takes it straight to the presses.  Then a sniff of cocaine, a Tom Collins, and a few hours of stimulating talk before the fireplace with my manservant Jacky.

El Mano de Dios

I've already written directly about Gauchito Gil and San La Muerte, two of the more popular Argentine folk saints.  Both have widespread and fervent cults, with thousands of devotees, roadside shrines ranging in size from small altars to sculpture gardens and even centers of pilgrimage:  holy cities, so to speak; despite all this, despite the many attestations of miracles, the Catholic Church does not recognize these saints.

San La Muerte and Caspar, the dead baby.

This may be understandable, at least in the case of San La Muerte, aka Saint Death or Holy Death.  An imposing figure, a skeleton, often robed and wielding a scythe, sometimes leaning forward in his throne, he is basically a sainted Grim Reaper.  Although some pray to him as one would with any other saint, for matters of love (red), money (gold) or other worldly powers and concerns, he is suspected to be the patron of more sinister worshipers, and nefarious deeds have been discovered and ascribed to his influence.  His cult is strongest in northeast Argentina, especially in Corrientes.  Some speculate the cult is a product of the encounter between Guaraní ancestor worship, which included the veneration of bones, and the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the 1760's; but fact is, nobody know exactly when or how it started.

A similar figure is, unsurprisingly, also worshiped in Mexico.  I say unsurprisingly because death, skulls and skeletons are a common Mexican artistic motif and Todos Santos (All Saint's Day), or the Day of the Dead, is one of Mexico's most rambunctious and widely-celebrated religious traditions.  Death is mourned and celebrated with drink, fireworks and feasting at the local cemetery.   The image of the mother is also an important motif in Mexican culture and the national patroness is La Virgen de Guadalupe, an image ubiquitous in Mexico and wherever Mexicans live.  She is the heart and soul of Catholic Mexico.  Not surprising that death is, unlike in Argentina, a woman:  La Santisima Muerte.  This would be an interesting area of study; the respective gender of "Saint Death" in Mexico and Argentina and why such a similar figure appeared in both countries.  I wonder if it could be something as secular as the fact that both countries are the largest producers of cultural products in Latin America:  music, television, literature and especially cinema.  Not sure why this would be, but for some reason the possibility came to mind.

Anyway, pictured above is my red San La Muerte.  I had actually first purchased a flashier gold statuette, but my mother-in-law knocked it off a table while tidying up, and it broke into pieces.  She's a psychoanalyst and my wife is as well; my wife is always trying to tell me that many of my accidents are not that at all, but unconscious reflections of inner desires or aversions.  So it's ironic that her mother, who disapproves of these things, "accidentally" broke it.  The iconoclastic mother-in-law.

In writing this I learned that Guatemala also has a skeletal death saint, El Rey San Pascual, who seems to be pretty much the same as Argentina's San La Muerte.  The three death saints I've discussed are believed to have their origins in pre-Colombian religion; indeed, the syncretism between non-Christian religious beliefs and Catholicism is a Latin American-wide phenomenon.  African traditions have blended with Christianity to produce Candomblé (Brazil), Voudon (Haiti) and Santería (Cuba) to name but a few.  In countries with a fewer African Americans, such as Guatemala and Mexico, this process took place with Native American beliefs.  The Catholic Church has always been tolerant of the syncretism, up to a point.  Indeed, allowing the use of "pagan" traditions was first applied to European Christianization and even has a name:  Interpretatio Christiana.  This has become a point of contention in countries once dominated by Catholicism but now rife with various Protestant and Evangelical sects, which seek to eliminate pagan traditions from Christian belief and practice.  In Guatemala, this has led to riots on several occasions; one notorious brawl took place of the steps of the cathedral in Chichicastengo.  

"Chichi" has a very strong syncretic religious culture.  I witnessed a ritual in nearby Utatlán, at the end of a long, incense-filled, tunnel-like cave under a Mayan temple complex.  I also saw what was clearly a fertility ritual before a stone idol called Pascual Abaj; this sits atop a hill closer to Chichi than Utatlán.  I photographed this ritual at the friendly urging of the man performing it, and made extensive notes on the precise actions he performed.  One day I'll dig up this notebook and photos to share here on LoS.  I was also personally blessed by a curandero in Nebaj, a bit farther north, at a shrine hidden in a cornfield.  It involved lots of prayers and the burning of various materials we picked up at the local market.  What bound all three of these rituals was the free intermingling of the names of recognizable Catholic saints with Mayan gods.  Syncretism in action.  There was also a Day of the Dead in the Guatemalan town of Todos Santos; this was an emotional experience for me, having not long prior lost my father, and I danced and drank all night with a family who must have sensed my grief, as I was welcomed into the kitchen periodically throughout the night to warm up, rest and drink bowls of a delicious gruel that kept me going and helped absorb the copious amounts of alcohol I imbibed -- which in this town, is a big part of the ritual observance.  I feel privileged to have witnessed and participated in these rituals so I am eager to meet some practitioners of Afro-Catholic religions.  My only concern is to avoid becoming a gawking tourist; I need to participate, but I do not want to contribute to the "touristification" of these rituals.

I used to say that my only further use of psychedelics would be to try ayahuasca with a shaman to guide me, but ritual ingestion of ayahuasca, aka yagé, has unfortunately become a kind of drug tourism, the Quechua and Aymara-speaking regions treated like some kind of New Age Amsterdam, a New World Kathmandu.  William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg wrote an excellent book on their search for the drug, entitled The Yagé Letters.  A detailed and often hilarious account, it doesn't get into folk saints, but it does  describe a serious series of psychic and spiritual investigations.  It has also undoubtedly helped spawn the kind of zonked-out pilgrimage to the hinterlands I used to undertake without understanding the potential deleterious effects this can have on a spiritually rich but financially impoverished people.  Some will end up selling their religion to the highest bidder and others will become hucksters, with either no real knowledge of the shamanic role or just jiving the gullible and saving the real traditions for themselves.  This is, not in the specific context of spiritual tourism but tourism in general, why I turned a bit cold towards traveling in parts of Mexico and Guatemala, not for lack of "authentic" experience, but for contributing to the kind of human interactions that reduces everything to an exchange of goods and services for cash.  I realize tourism can be an important economic boost for a country, and if anyone needs a boost it's Mexico and Guatemala, but I'm kind of leery of the whole "Gringo Trail" these days.  I'd still like to experience the Afro-Latin-American traditions though.

 

But back to my collection of figurines, next pictured is Gauchito Gil.  I've discussed his story before, but it's worth repeating that before his murder, he'd enlisted in the war against Paraguay to escape the wrath of a local police chief, jealous of his affair with a wealthy widow.  After his return, he refused to fight in the Argentine Civil War and fled from the authorities into the pampa, more or less forced into the role of a bandit.  Gil was eventually captured and killed by the police, but not before he informed the gendarme who was about to cut his throat that his dying son would recover; he did, and the grateful policeman spread Gauchito's cult as thanks and penance.  Gil's roadside shrines are painted red and red banners hang from them or fly overhead.  His cult, like that of San La Muerte, is strongest in the north, in Corrientes, but it has spread throughout Argentina and into neighboring Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.  He even has a Facebook page.  But who doesn't?  Even San La Muerte is social media savvy.

Before Gil's throat was cut, he was hung upside down on a tree typical of the pampa.  This recollects Old World sources such as the crucifixion of Jesus (not to mention Mithras and Osiris) and also the self-sacrifice of Odin, who hung upside down on the Norse axis mundi named Yggdrasil, an ash tree to Gil's algarrobos.  Argentina has strong connection to Italy, so it's more likely that the upside down Gil was inspired by Italian pitture infamanti, portraits of criminals hung by their heels upon a tree, a way to humiliate condemned men, especially those deemed traitorous.  When the Roman populace rose up against them, Mussolini and mistress Clara Petacci were dragged from their home, hung by their heels by an angry mob and beaten to death.  The hanging by the heels part always intrigued me; perhaps I jump too quickly to conclusions in seeing a connection.  But this practice was almost surely based on the Roman predilection for crucifying the condemned upside down if an extra dose of humiliation was required.  The pitture infimati in turn became the model for the The Hanged Man, the 12th card of the Tarot's Major Arcana.  In the Tarot, the hanged man is usually hung from either a tree, or a leafy tree-like Tau, the man's body cross-like, his face serene, seemingly out of place in a less than serene predicament.  He also has a nimbus around his head, like a saint or a martyr.  This may be because the crucifixion is a prelude to illumination, as in Odin's case, or resurrection, as in the case of Jesus.  For that matter, in Gil's case as well, for while the man died on the tree, his cult was also born; the man became the saint, his power to intercede on behalf of the powerless announced.  Tarot-designer A.E. Waite doesn't see The Hanged Man as a martyr and it's not generally interpreted in this light, but the cardcould easily have formed the basis of Gil's iconography.  A position usually reserved for reviled criminals but who was, in Gil's case, a saint.

I mention the bit about Gil refusing to fight and the story about being drafted because this element also plays into the story of La Difunta Correa.  Legend is that circa 1840 a woman named Correa set off to rejoin her husband, who'd been drafted to fight in the Argentine Civil War.  (Other versions of the tale have her fleeing into the pampa because she had her child out of wedlock, while others yet have her fleeing the sexual advances of corrupt officials -- a common element in the "virgin martyr" category of saint; there are dozens of examples in the "official" canon).  She died of thirst on the way and, when some gauchos came across the body four days later, her baby was still able to suckle at her breast.  The gauchos buried her and saved the baby.  So both Saints' tales involve the gaucho, still a powerful symbol of freedom, men who live beyond the confines, and law, of the city, in the wide and wild pampa, with their own code of justice, symbolized by the gaucho's knife.  The tango, another symbol of Argentine society and a powerful erotic dance, is said to have been born in the brothels, evolving from the milongas which were first danced by pairs of men, imitating the movements and gestures of a knife fight.  Both stories also attest to the heavy weight these Civil Wars put on people's hearts, as brother fought brother and tore the people apart.  Some versions of Correa's story also involve unjust officials whose actions set in motion the Saint's martrydom.  So we have two massively popular cults, very death-centered, plus the worship of death itself, all three of which seem to have grown most rapidly in the years following the Falklands/Malvinas War.  This war is a big part of contemporary Argentine consciousness, the outline of the islands instantly recognizable on signs in countless cities reading "Las Malvinas son Argentinas!"  The Malvinas are Argentinian!  This war also brought down a brutaldictatorship and with its exit came countless revelations of a long reign of terror effectuated by the police and the military:  kidnappings, murder, horrifying detention centers, theft of children, the stuff of nightmares.  It's a scar on every family, and my own is no exception.

Below is the latest addition to my collection.  La Difunta Correa's cult is centered in Vallecito and was first spread by cattle drivers -- gauchos -- and now more by truckers.  Roadside shrines are apparent because devotees leave bottles of water to represent her "eternal" thirst.

There is a Catholic antecedent to this story, by the way.  There is a story in Jacobus da Vorigine's Golden Legend about a barren couple, a Roman Governor and his wife, who had their prayer for a child granted to them by Christ, via Mary Magdalene's intercession.  The governor and pregnant wife then set sail for Rome to meet St. Peter, but the wife died en route, during childbirth.  Making land, the governor found he could not bury the body, so he covered it with his cloak and left the doomed baby by her breast.  He returned two years later, shocked to find his child still alive, having suckled at his mother's breast the whole time, her body incorrupt.  Mary Magdalene, who'd accompanied him, then resurrected the wife!

La Difunta Correa

I don't have a figurine for this last saint, but my mother-in-law, the iconoclast, told me about him when she gave me La Difunta Correa:  Miguel Ángel Gaitán.  Miguel was a baby who died in 1967.  In 1973 a violent storm unearthed his coffin and his corpse was found to be incorrupt.  This is a pretty common first step towards sainthood.  A saint specific to the Toulouse region, Germaine of Pibrac, is such a saint.  And of course the incorrupt body of the Roman Governor's wife precedes the story of Gaitán and La Difunta Correa. The locals made four attempts to shelter the coffin but each time a tomb was erected, it was later found demolished.  This is actually quite a common motif in legends surrounding miraculous images of the Virgin.  It was then decided simply to place the coffin in a chapel, but even then, the lid was found to have been removed; after this went on for a while the boy's mother decided to put a glass lid on the coffin and today, the little mummy receives thousands of visitors yearly and answers prayers.  This too is not unheard of in "official" Catholic saints.  I've seen plenty of saints in glass coffins; in Cortona, Italy, where I stayed for 3 months back in 1990, the dried cadaver of an obscure local saint, Saint Margaret of Cortona, was placed upon the parish church's altar.

A bit out of place, but it just occurred to me that the story of Correa is also a strong symbol of a mother's love for her child, which recalls what I said about the role of the mother in Mexico, but also the role of the Virgin.  The incorruptibility of the body is an indication of spiritual purity, itself linked to sexual purity.  For the Virgin is free from original sin, an innocent not corrupted by the carnal pleasures responsible for the Fall and thus, the aging and infirmity-prone corporal bodies from which Adam and Eve were originally free.  Makes the Christian Science concept of sin as a kind of disease seem a bit less innovative; the incorrupt bodies of the pure are the other side of the doctrine that sin causes corporeal corruption....

So none of these miracles or stories, and even their specific details, are out of place among the enormous roster of Catholic saints, many so local that most people haven't even heard of them, even Catholics from the same country.  St. Fris, anyone?

People are hungry for religion, especially receptive to the idea that prayer and offerings can result in miracles; where poverty is endemic, sickness, education, money and success are concerns with more hopelessness attached to them than in much richer countries.  And in the last few decades, Argentina has slipped deeper and deeper into poverty and all its accompanying woes.  It is a country dominated by a profound sense of insecurity, for the future, for the hope of economic recovery and an end to corruption, the explosive growth of shanty towns and above all, crime.  This in a country already wounded by a recent war and a brutal dictatorship, many of whose criminal perpetrators are still alive.  I would only expect these cults and others like them to grow.  Everybody's looking for a miracle, to be touched by the Hand of God.  Or at least one of his deputies.

With folk saints, all the familiar elements of official Catholic saints are recycled and put into a more contemporary and familiar context -- not, for example, Roman Gaul, but contemporary Argentina.  And this will continue to happen, whether officially recognized or not.  In France, the current most popular "official" saints date largely from the 19th century; long enough ago that the historicity of the accounts is not an issue, but close enough in time and within familiar enough events to reassure the devoted that their saint knows exactly what they might going through.  As the times continue to change, we can expect periodic updates to the legends of existing folk saints, as well as the development of entirely new ones.  The age of miracles isn't over.  Evangelicals will speak in tongues and be slain in the Spirit like the apostles, the logical conclusion of the Protestant devaluation of the role of the priest as an intermediary, the belief that each man and woman can read the Bible for themselves and develop a special relationship with the Christ.  Catholics, still valuing the role of the priest, will continue to look towards even holier intermediaries, and if the old ones are found lacking -- because inevitably, poor people will remain poor, sick people will not recover and the sterile will remain childless -- new ones are just waiting to be found.

"You're Lost Little Girl...."

This is a (belated) tale of constructing "synchronicity", a piling-up of information with resonant themes.  In our case, instead of standing back and letting others go hog-wild with conspiracy theories, we freely admit that this is in fact, a construction.  Disparate, unrelated facts, brought together by the mind.  Perception as an organizing process.
 
On Dec. 20, I opened Firefox and my start page appears:  Google.  On this day the "Google doodle" was an interactive story board featuring the tale of Little Red Riding Hood to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Grimm's Fairy Tales.

I went to my Facebook page and on my newsfeed there was a blurb about the photobomb of Vicki Soto; behind her a man makes the "devil's horns" hand sign.  This led to a post (The Devil you say), but not before recalling that I had previously linked a "martyred" young woman to the tale of Riding Hood in a previous post entitled The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf.

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being.

I Googled "origin of the name Soto" and found:  The Soto family originally lived in one of the numerous towns or villages named Soto. The place-name Soto is derived from the Spanish word "soto," which refers to a "thicket" or "grove." This word is itself derived from the Latin word "saltus," which refers to a pasture land containing a forest or wood.  (http://www.houseofnames.com/soto-family-crest)

So now, the link in my head between one "virgin martyr" and another has a kind of "objective" fact.

 

Flash forward nine days to Dec. 29.  At this point, the preceding text is a dusty draft, headed for the bin. However, as I'm organizing some stray folders, I come across the preceding three images.  I apparently scanned these images from a French magazine in April, 2012, probably struck by the fact they used the Little Red Riding Hood story in the sense I discussed in my own post on the tale (The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf, October, 2009); that is to say, the metaphor for sexual predation.

These images resonated so well with the themes in this draft that I resurrected this post.

Continuing with Victoria Soto: She is the only one of the Sandy Hook victims with her own Wikipedia page, the one victim for some reason CNN decided to focus upon (remember The Devil you say, December 29).  Soto is the only name I know from the massacre; I'm certainly not alone.

She has been widely hailed as a hero:  Shots and screaming were heard over the intercom system and Soto hid several children in a closet. When Lanza entered her classroom, Soto told him that the children were in the auditorium. However, several of the children then came out of their hiding places and ran. As they ran, Lanza shot them dead. Soto, fearing for the lives of her other students put herself between her students and the shooter who then fatally shot her.

There were, however, several other acts of this sort which could just as easily be labelled "heroic."  So why focus on Vicki Soto?  First of all, by most accounts she appears to have been a genuinely nice person.  Her actions that day were undoubtedly admirable.  It doesn't hurt that she was also young, full of promise and rather pretty.

I think the scope of this tragedy makes it difficult to focus on any one child....it would seem unfair in some way.  It's hard to remember so many names, there are no details of their short lives to stab our hearts with.  No individual face stands out.  So this young woman became a focus of attention.  The martyred young woman is a powerful archetype; in this case her youth links her to the children in a way an older, greyer teacher might not.  She serves as bridge between the children and the world.  By focusing on Soto, a fair choice is made to symbolize all the victims, all the horror distilled into one individual, bringing it all to a more digestible bit of news.  I don't see this as an engineered meme, but a kind of organic response, a feedback loop between popular emotional response, the recognition of her appeal and then, imitation, repetition, re-circulation.

Victoria Soto, facing down the wolf.  In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf is disguised as Grandma.  I read the name Adam Lanza somewhere interpreted as "Man Lance" (as one other famous Lance is in the news again for doping, or "leg strong").  Adam Lanza also wore a mask.  "Adam (Hebrew: אָדָֿם) comes from the triliteral root אָדַֿם ( 'ADM ), meaning "red", "fair", "handsome". (!!)  And it appears that Lanza comes from Lancia, a name derived from a soldier or lancer.  There is an obvious metaphor here of sexual aggression, a "man lance", but the woman's name suggests victory over the forest, as with Riding Hood.

In some roundabout evocation, this goes back to the very real feeling of a kind of moral victory over Lanza/the Wolf; her humanity in the face of the horror is a kind of victory in death that goes down well in our Christian culture, what with Christ's example followed by numerous Saints among the Catholic martyrs.

(Follow the virgin martyr tag for an extensive selection of posts on the theme).

Loren Coleman has been writing about the symbolism of a "lady in red" (Holmes' Harlots, July 30, 2012).  He links several appearances of the red woman to the Aurora shootings in Colorado, itself one in a series of shootings with patterns pointing to what Coleman calls "Red Dawn" scenarios.  This follows a post of July 22, Blood Red Movie Massacres.  Back on May 3, The Sink Hole's Will Morgan devoted a post to the topic, unrelated to shootings, entitled....Lady in Red.  Morgan links the red lady to the Sacred Whore of Babylon.  Coleman links her to prostitution.  Old acquaintace Tate Bunker, who I haven't actually spoken to in 20 years or so, premiered his first feature film, Little Red at the Milwaukee Film Festival (September 30).  It's a modern re-telling of the tale with the Wolf as a sexual predator named Lou. Meanwhile, I have discussed Little Red Riding Hood as a cautionary tale against prostitution and a metaphor for sexual predation.

Soto is not Little Red Riding Hood, but there are definitely enough "syncs" around which to construct a synchromystic narrative.  The images I've posted are linked to sexual predation on the internet, not mass murder (though I'm sure a lot more could be said about the sexual aspects of murder and/or violence).  Fact is, though, I re-discovered 'em on the day I saw another Little Red link, a Satanic photobomb, and discovered that the photobombee's name meant forest.  By riffing a bit around that, a lot more connections come up.  Which sounds like a way of saying it's all in your head.  The facts are out there, but the nexus is the mind.

So, most of you will be saying, ok, so?  So nothing.  Synchromystics just keep piling this shit on and think they've discovered the entrails of God.  I'm just bored and detailing the tracks of my tears, and that rhymes with bears not beers, as in the the discrete rips at the edges of reality which allow us to think we've discovered something we in fact have built ourselves....and merely forgotten....

The eyes have it

A few days ago in Viareggio, Italy, a 46-year-old man stood up during Mass and gouged his own eyes out with his hands.  Exclamation point.

According to the surgeon who treated the man, the parishioner heard voices telling him to do it.

I popped a link to this article on my Facebook page and a friend was quick to link to the Wikipedia entry on Saint Lucy, a.k.a. Santa Lucia (c. 283-304 CE) .  Given that The Gid mentioned this saint a while ago, I'm chagrined I didn't think of her myself.  Back then we were investigating the symbolic conflation of eyes and breasts.  Lucy, often depicted holding a platter of eyes, is often associated with Agatha (c. 231-251 CE), often depicted holding a platter of breasts.

Agatha was a virgin martyr who suffered the gruesome fate of having her breasts sheared off before being cooked alive.  She is a typical saint of her genre:  having dedicated herself to Christ, she rejects the advances of a pagan suitor and for her refusal suffers torture and death.  Interestingly, in the legends of  virgin martyrs Saints Liberata and Quiteria, which I've previously examined, the story involves nine sisters persecuted for the same reasons as Agatha.  I've just learned that Agatha at one point was given over to a brother as part of her punishment, owned by a woman with nine daughters.

Lucy is basically the same tale.  Wooed by a pagan, she refuses to break her vow of chastity to Christ and refuses to sacrifice to the emperor.  Part of her sentence, like Agatha, was to be defiled in a brothel.  She too suffered torture and death.  The tradition of her eyes being gouged out appears to be absent from her story until the 15th century, which may indicate a conscious modeling on the Agatha legend.  Both after all, are Sicilian in origin, Agatha hailing from Catania and Lucy, from Syracuse, only 63 kilometers to the south.

In Sweden, a procession on St. Lucy's feast day is led by a young girl elected to be Lucy for the year.  In addition to the procession, a "St. Lucia Bun" is eaten.  Some pictures show this bun resemble a pair of eyes.  I had a conversation with woman in Catalonia who recalled that on St. Agatha's day, her village elected an Agatha and had a procession.  A bun, formed into a pair of breasts, was cooked, taken to the church to be blessed and then taken home again.

The metaphor of light is an important feature of the processions in the Scandinavian countries; the elected Lucy wears a crown of candles.  Her day, December 13th, was once (incorrectly) believed to be the shortest day of the year.  There is thus something of a pagan antecedent going one here in the commemoration of the winter solstice.  In this it is not so far from other Christmas and indeed Hannukah ("Festival of Lights") traditions: menorah, Yule log, Christmas lights, etc.

Lucy is a patron of the blind and is prayed to by those at risk of going blind.  Her name is derived from "lux" ("light") and her function is thus also a metaphor for God's grace, in the sense of "seeing the light" or having one's vision restored, as in the song Amazing Grace. ("Was blind but now I see.")  She  has in effect given her eyes so that others may see, brought into the light by her example of faith and sacrifice.

I am also reminded of the legend of St. Fris (previously discussed here).  His legend is also intimately connected to the winter solstice.  When his incorrupt body was discovered, a team of oxen were employed to move his sarcophagus to a new resting place, yet it could not be budged.  Lucy's legend has it that when she was to be taken off to the brothel, a team of oxen could not move her.  Whether or not this common element of solstice and oxen represents a common wellspring, however, I cannot say.

****

So Lucy had her eyes gouged out, which is indeed gruesome.  But gouging out one's own eyes is a different tale.  Another friend posted this tale in response to my Facebook blurb:  In 2005 R&B singer Houston gouged one of his eyes out with a plastic fork.

"....He said he had to get the devil off of his back and that’s the only way he could kill the devil."

Houston, whose full name is Houston Summers IV, is a Los Angeles native. He was raised strictly Christian and was "constantly at odds with the temptations that come with success in the music business" [a post-gouging statement read].

Not to be facetious, but we wonder if this might have something to do with a saying by Jesus found in both Matthew 5:29 and Mark 9:47 (KJV): 

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire....

It's not out of the question to imagine that a mentally unbalanced person in an extreme state of agitation would take these words literally.

And then there's this guy.  In 2009, death row inmate Andre Thomas gouged out his remaining eye and ate it.  He was awaiting execution for killing his estranged wife and two kids, and then cutting their hearts out.

I'm pretty sure that one didn't come from Jesus.

Then again, there is that business with the Sacred Heart....

Finally, the only other mythological precedent I know of offhand is the story of Oedipus.  He unknwoingly killed his father and wed his mother.  When he later discovered what he'd done, he gouged his eyes out with a brooch from his mother/wife's robe.  Could Freud help explain what's going on in such cases?

[The Sandman].... lent support to his [Freud's] view that the feeling of uncanniness is directly related to the sight of the female genitals, particularly those of the mother. He stressed the frequent unconscious equivalence between the eyes and the genital organs, and between blindness and castration. Blinding oneself, like Oedipus, is an attenuated form of self-castration, but it also makes one the bearer of a blind eye, which represents the other sex while disfiguring the face. In his theory, Freud, with a single word, übersehen, which means both to look and to overlook, successfully condensed the story of Oedipus.

The link between the eyes and the breasts, which seems clear from the Agatha/Lucy parallels, supports Freud's analysis.  The man cuts out his own eyes, which are linked to the breasts, that intimate first connection between mother and child (milk and semen also being life-bringing fluids).  He not only castrates himself for these sexual feelings for his mother, but he mutilates her as well as punishment for arousing him.  The eyes are a sexual organ, the breast filling the infant vision as he suckles, deriving both oral pleasure, nutrition and an undeveloped sexual arousal.

Is it merely coincidence, that in our Italian case, the man was attending mass with is mother?

Georges Bataille, in The Story of the Eye, further elaborates upon the eye as a sexual organ.  In his book, the eye is interchangeable with testicles and eggs, and is frequently sexualized along with bodily fluids:  milk, urine, semen, blood, etc.

In one scene a young priest is seduced.  An kind of orgy ensues which involves a  parody of the Eucharist in which the bread and wine is desecrated with urine and semen.  The priest is murdered during orgasm.  One of his eyes is extracted and a character inserts it into her vagina while she has sex with the narrator.

I'm not going to embark on a full-blown psychoanalytic trip here or try to say what these things symbolize.  I think it's clear enough that the sex/death/eyeball trip is something to be considered and that when someone tears out their own eyeballs, it's more than mere "weird news".  Though it is that too.

We'll be keeping our eyes peeled for more of this sort of thing; in the meantime we'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on these matters....

Variations upon a theme: Pelagius(es) versus the Moors

Pelayo of Asturias unifies sky and earth....

You will recall in our survey of Virgin Martyrs that their martyrdom often resulted from a refusal to marry what these young Christians would have considered heathens.  Saint Quiteria, Liberata, Saturnina, Pelagia....each one slain for their chastity before the pagans.

The Saintes Puelles were likewise martyred for refusing to bow before pagans.  Saint Sernin was murdered for his refusal to offer sacrifices at the pagan temples.  Defying the pagan authorities, the Puelles gathered his remains and gave him a Christian burial; for this they were beaten and exiled.  The abbé Rous makes much of the fact that the word "puelle" signifies "virgin".

This resistance of "puelles" to heathen approaches is also illustrated in the the tale of nunnery of Sant Pere de les Puel·les.  According to the legend, the nuns there were daughters of noble families who retreated to the convent to avoid arranged marriages.  One version has it that the puelles, the nuns, disfigured themselved in order to avoid being violated by Moorish invaders under Al-Mansur in 986 CE.

In this case then, the resistance is to Islam.  Certainly the diffusion of these tales not only recalls Chritianity's era of weakness and vulnerabilty under the Roman persecutions, but under the later Saracen occupation of the Iberian peninsula.  It would necessarily bring to mind the (then) more current struggles with the Muslims in the Holy Land.  (It would be interesting to see if their cults are undergoing a resurgance given the current climate of anxiety and hostility towards Islam in the face of terrorism, immigration etc.)

There is a whole genre of religious lore constructed around the crusades against the Moors in Spain.  Saint James appeared at one particularly pitched battle, leading the Christians to victory, thus earning him the epithet Santiago Matamoros (Moor-Slayer).  Notre Dame de Sabart, a Black Virgin, appeared to no less a personage as Charlemagne, preventing him from entering a death-trap set by his Muslim foes in the valley of Vicdessos.  La Virgen de Montserrat was hidden from the Moors at its current location for protection.

Let's cut over to Asturias.  The Moors had defeated the Wisigothic King Roderic in 711 at the Battle of Guadalete.  Subsequent Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula was both fast and thorough.  In the years following 711 a Wisigoth by the name of Pelayo came to lead the resistance.  Traditions states that in 722 Pelayo made his stand at Covadonga, where a hermit had hidden a statue of the Virgin (Our Lady of Covadonga) to protect it from the Moors, like at Montserrat.  Pelayo prayed in this cave for the help of the Virgin; in the battle that ensued, miraculous intercession is described.  The Christians were victorious and this event is cited as the beginning of the reconquista; indeed, the Kingdom of Asturias was able to maintain its autonomy for the duration of the Moorish occupation.

The first monastery and chapel at Covadonga date from the reign of King Alfonso I (739-757) and to this day the place remains an important destination for pilgrims.  What we find interesting is that in some legends associated with Pelayo, his uprising was sparked by the forced marriage of his sister to the Moorish governor Mununza:

Tradition has it that he fell in love with Pelayo's sister, Ormesinda, and that, together with Kazim, kidnapped and married her. The chronicle of Alfonsio III speaks of a "compulsory marriage", the failure of which compelled Pelayo into rebellion.

Historians speculate that this was a move on Pelayo's part to create an alliance with the new power structure and secure a preferential place among the defeated Wisigothic nobles.  Others, however, claim that Pelayo opposed the wedding and imply his armed resistance was a result of protecting his sister's virtue.  It would be useful to point out that Pelayo is the Spanish name; in English he is know as....Pelagius.  One cannot help but recall the many tales of fearless resistance to heathen advances by a young virgin named....Pelagia (please see our earlier post  for details).

Shrine of Our Lady of Covadonga

The name Covadonga comes from Latin, Cova Dominica, or "Cavern of the Lady".  So this Pelagius starts the reconquest of Spain to protect a woman's virtue, winning a battle by successfully defending a place known as the lady's cavern.  Paging Dr. Freud....

The shrine sits in a cave perched above a sheer rock face from which water pours at different spots, forming a large pool at the base.  This impressive sight of living water pouring forth from the rock seems strikingly akin to a metaphor for the miracle of life itself, like the child emerging from the mother's womb.

Living Water

It also recalls Jesus as the Water of Life and brings the following verse to mind; John 19:34:

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.

Easy to see how this could be associated with childbirth, involving as it does water and blood.  This post-crucifixion/childbirth link is intriguing.  Jesus, after all, was about to be reborn.  His crucifixion, the sacrifice, expiates us from original sin and pain in childbirth is explicitly mentioned in the Bible as punishment for Adam and Eve's sin.  Jesus and the Virgin Mary were both paths to override this malediction.  It also strikes us that Pelayo's entrance and victorious emergence from the cave in a way echoes Jesus's own resurrection; the reborn Christ becoming a handy and inspirational metaphor for the eventual rebirth of Christian Spain.

This could be developed quite a bit but somehow we figure in some ways it's already been done, more nimbly by people much more clever than we.

Finally, we'd like to venture that yet another Pelayo, Pelagius of Cordova, represents a type of masculine Virgin Martyr.  The story here is that Pelagius (c. 912-926) was left with the Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III as a trade for another captive...a trade that never occurred.  After three years, he was offered his freedom on the condition he convert to Islam; his refusal led to his torture and susequent execution.

Yet some versions of this story aren't about his refusal to convert but his refusal to bend over.  The physical beauty of the boy and the homosexual desire of the Caliph is emphasized.  Details differ according to some versions, but in each, the boy refuses to submit, his chastity is preserved.

According to Wikipedia, "The cult of Saint Pelagius is thought to have provided spiritual energy for centuries to the Iberian Reconquista...."  This is certainly true of our Asturian Pelagius!  Pelagius of Cordova's feast day is on June 26, which doesn't necessarily correspond to those of our female Virgin Martyrs, but it is interesting that the major shrine of this Pelagius, despite the Andalusian setting of his tale, is to be found in Oviedo, capital of Asturias.  Asturias is a northern province just next to Galicia, origin of the Liberata/Quiteria cult....and where of Pelagius, instigator of the reconquest, first defeated the Moors....

Of course this tale demonizes the Moors and upholds Christian virtue, but at least one author thinks that on some levels it is a warning about same sex desire, a cautionary tale of sorts.

Whatever the sexual overtones of this story, it's not unsurprsing as a bit of propaganda that works on many levels.

Not having a snappy ending, we'll admit to not knowing where to go next and can only state our wish that you visitors, apparently numerous, would leave some comments and give your thoughts....

Saintes Puelles, Part 3: Holy Virgins

Please see Les Saintes Puelles and Les Saintes Puelles 2 before continuing.

My research into the Puelles has led me to Toulouse, Mas-Saintes-Puelles and even Asturias, but the next line of inquiry practically started  in my own backyard.

St. Libérate; reliquary in the Eglise Notre Dame, Bouillac

Not long from Aucamville there is an empty field where a large and prosperous monastery once stood. The Abbey of Grandselve, or Abbaye de Notre Dame de Grandselve, is known primarily as a Cistercian abbey but was in fact established by Benedictines, in 1114. The history of this abbey would be a story unto itself. All that remains is the gatehouse; the cloister, abbey church, dormitories etc. exist only as hedges planted to give visitors an idea of the size and layout of the place. Striking if you consider that the abbey church here was once the largest Romanesque church in Europe, an honor now belonging to the St. Sernin Basilica in Toulouse.

Several items from the church are now located a few kilometers away in the village church at Bouillac; these include ornate gold and silver reliquaries, pillars and the remnants of sculpted works.

The sculptures struck me because of the iconographic elements recalling the Puelles statue at Tautavel.  These sculptures depict Mary Magdalene and Saint Anne: Magdalene is identified by her flowing hair and the jar she carries. Saint Anne is identified by her book. This symbolizes her teaching the Virgin Mary to read and is a common attribute from the Middle Ages onwards.  If you've read our previous posts, you may recall that at Tautavel our Puelles carry a book and a jar as well.

Continuing through the church, I came across a reliquary in the form of a bust: Saint Libérate.  Hold on to your hats.

According to a note at Bouillac, Libérate, aka Livrade or Liberata, was a the daughter of Catillius, the King of Galicia. The King ordered his daughter marry a pagan and she fled to Aquitaine with her twin sisters (!) Quitterie and Gemine. In Aquitaine, they had a lot of success spreading the Christian faith. Eventually, they were denounced by their father, arrested and beheaded by a Roman official by the name of Moderius.

Libérate's remains were in Sigüenza, Spain by 1082. In 1114, the year Grandselve Abbey was founded, they were said to be at the abbey. A “notable” part of her remains are now found in Mazères.

The idea of twin sisters spreading the faith in their place of refuge echoes the Puelles and the legends associated with Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The martyrdom resulting from rejecting a pagan spouse is a genre unto itself: recall if you will the Benedictine convent Sant Pere de les Puel•les in Barcelona, where legends have the young women, puelles [maidens], disfiguring themselves in order to escape being defiled by Moorish invaders. Alternate versions generalize self-mutilation as a means of escaping arranged marriages.

As we will see, this theme is repeated in several variations upon the Libérate legend originating in northern Portugal and Galicia. What we find emerging is a subset of the virgin martyr type--the precise emphasis abbé Rous placed on the legend of the Saintes Puelles (see part 2).

As it turns out, the cult of Libérate is rather secondary to that of her sister Quiteria (whose name, incidentally, comes from a title of Astarte meaning “the red one”). According to Wikipedia, Quiteria (Quitterie) was the daughter of a Galician prince. Rejecting an unwanted marriage she fled to Aire-sur-l’Adour in Gascony, where she was captured and beheaded in the Montus forest, along with her sister Liberata. Quiteria's remains are in Aire-sur-l'Adour and Libérate's are said to be contained in a 14th century sarcophagus in the church of St. Jean-Baptiste in Mazères.

English Wikipedia leaves something out. An alternate legend related in Catalan Viquipèdia states that she was the daughter of a Wisigoth king--Aeci--in Toulouse.

According to Portuguese tradition, there were nine sisters in total (nine muses?), born in Minho to the wife of a Roman military official. The mother was mortified at having so many children, like an animal, and ordered them drowned. The maid entrusted with this task secretly refused, instead bringing them to be raised by local women .

As adults, they, like Sernin, refused to worship local gods. They were brought before their father and ordered to marry. They refused and were imprisoned. They then escaped and went on to lead a guerrilla war against their father! (Shades of Jeanne d’Arc, aka la pucele....) In this version Quiteria was caught and beheaded.

Euphemia, or Eumelia, another sister, threw herself from a cliff to avoid capture.  When she fell, the rock opened and swallowed her whole; a spring immediately appeared on the spot. This idea of being swallowed by rock and a subsequent spring echoes the Galician legends around St. Jacques and legends around Saint Fris, whose cult is centered in Gascony....where much of the 9-sisters action was said to have taken place.

Other Portuguese legends have it that these sisters came from Baiona, Pontevedra. In this version Eumelia is beheaded and thrown into the sea, from whence she emerged with her head in her hands, holding dogs at bay. The first festival honoring Eumelia took place at Tui, Pontevedra in 1688. Quiteria’s cult, centered in Aire-sur-l’Adour is on the St James Way; the cult could have easily traveled back and forth between Gascony and Galicia. Her cult is thus found France, Spain, Portugal and was brought by the latter to Brazil and India.

One of the nine sisters, mentioned by name at Bouillac along with Quitterie and Libérate, is Gema, also known as Marinha or Margarida.

She has been identified/conflated with Saint Marina of Aguas Santas (119-139 CE). The details of her legend should by now be familiar; she was one of nine sisters born Baiona to the wife of Lucius Castelius Severus, the Roman governor. The mother, Calsia, ordered them drowned in the Miñor River. The servant thus entrusted, Sila, was a secret Christian and left them with several families later to be baptized by Saint Ovidus. At age 20 they were brought before their father and ordered to renounce their faith. Refusing, they were imprisoned and escaped. Where they were beheaded, a spring appeared—the Aguas Santas.

So, obviously this is a variation upon the same legend, with differing details and adapted to another location. Marina died on January 18th but her feast day is exactly seven months later on July 18th. Libérate is celebrated on July 20th, the date her relics were brought from Sigüenza to Baiona by Bernard de Sedirac, a Benedictine.

Wikipedia also has a brief entry on Saint Liberata and Saint Faustina of Como, in Italy. These sisters, holy virgins, founded the convent of Saint Margarita and died c. 580 CE. Their feast day: January 18th. Interestingly, French Wikipedia states that when Saint Quitterie was decapitated in Aire-sur-l'Adour, a bishop named Faust converted the entire town to Christianity, aided by a miracle: the decapitated head fell to the ground and a spring appeared. The virgin then took her head in her hands and placed it on a hill in the town, where her sarcophagus rests today. Elements of this story are found in that of her sister, Saint Eumelia and that of another Saint, Saturnina, whose story is clearly another version of that of the nine sisters.

The patroness of Pizzone is a holy virgin by the name of Saint Liberata. In Pizzone her feast day is on June 10th and in the Chicago area on the 8th. Other celebrations include January 11th and July 20th. In Chicago, there is a special mass and a procession in her honor: she is usually portrayed crucified. Her parents names, as well as those of her 8 sisters, confirm she is one and the same as Libérate.

Margaret the Virgin (Margaret of Antioch) is yet another variation on the holy virgin, celebrated by Anglicans and Catholics on July 20th, just as Libérate. (Orthodox Christians celebrate her on the 17th). Margaret the Virgin was the daughter of a pagan priest who lived apart from her family because they scorned her faith. She was offered to Roman governor in marriage. Her refusal led to being tortured and beheaded in 304 CE. The Eastern Orthodox Church calls her San Marina and identifies her with Saint Pelagia.  This holy virgin leaped from a rooftop rather than suffer dishonor from soldiers, much like the “puelles” of Barcelona and Saint Eumelia. Another Pelagia, of Tarsus, refused marriage to both Diocletian and his son and was thus burnt at the stake.  Pelagia is sometimes conflated with Marina the Monk, who we will look at more closely in a minute.

Another curious conflation of the Libérate figure is Saint Wilgefortis. Her cult appeared in the 14th century. Her story begins like the others, often set in Portugal. A young noble, she was promised by her father to a pagan king. She took a vow of virginity and tried to stave off the wedding through prayer; she hoped to become repulsive and thus undesirable. Her prayers were answered in an odd way: she sprouted a beard! Her father, furious, had her crucified, like Saint Liberata of Pizzone.

Folk etymology has it that her name comes from “virgo fortis” but this is likely spurious. Her name in France and Italy is Liberata and in Sigüenza she is said to be "confused" with the sister of Saint Marina of Aguas Santas. However, her feast day of July 20th may indicate the “confusion” was widespread—her cult spanned Europe but was officially suppressed in 1969. Wilgefortis is invoked by women seeking to be liberated from abusive husbands or unhappy marriages. Not to say this isn’t a true today, but in the Middle Ages, this was undoubtedly a chronic problem.

Wilgefortis is a curious image, something like a crucified, bearded transvestite. But this theme of transvestism appears in another saint known as Marina, or Pelagia: Marina the Monk. Marina was the child of a wealthy Christian family in Lebanon. After the death of her mother, the young girl’s father wanted to enter a monastery. The girl wanted to go as well, so they came up with the idea that she should dress as a man. She spent her life as a monk, until a fateful incident at an inn. The night she and some brothers were staying at this inn, the innkeeper’s daughter and a soldier got jiggy and a few months later, her pregnancy was obvious. Confronted, the innkeeper’s daughter blamed Marina, who was expelled from the monastery and lived as a beggar at its gates. Eventually she was allowed back into the monastery, but was given all the shit work. Upon her death, it was discovered that she was in fact a woman; the innkeeper’s daughter and the soldier fessed up and the abbot was devastated by his unjust actions. Marina the monk died, incidentally on July 19th but is celebrated on February 12th.

If I may add just another variation upon the transvestite theme. You will recall that in some versions of the Quiteria/Liberata story, the sisters waged war against the pagans after escaping from captivity. Some versions of the story have the women escaping not from a Portuguese or Galician king, but a Wisigoth in Toulouse; in these, Quiteria fled to Gascony dressed as a cavalier. This may be a chicken or egg question but I find strong parallels to the story of Jeanne d'Arc. I've already noted she was called the "pucelle". As Wiktionary has it: "Old French pucele, from Late Latin pulicella ‘young girl’, a popular diminutive of puella ‘girl’."

Jeanne d'Arc, then, "la pucele" is known as a warrior, a "liberator" and much is made of both her virginity and her cross-dressing: "Joan of Arc wore men's clothes almost continually from her first attempts to reach the Dauphin, later crowned Charles VII, until her execution twenty-eight months later."

Another link is that chief among the Saints whose voices she heard was Margaret of Antioch. As we have seen, Margaret of Antioch, or the Virgin, has variously been identified at Saint Pelagia or the transvestite Margaret the Monk. Another one of her Saints was Catherine of Alexandria. Catherine was the daughter of a pagan governor and is revered as a virgin martyr. She refused to marry anyone beneath her station and eventually found one who met her standards: Christ. She was thus, as with many another example, a bride of Christ:

Saint Catherine also had a large female following, whose devotion was less likely to be expressed through pilgrimage. The importance of the virgin martyrs as the focus of devotion and models for proper feminine behavior increased during the late middle ages. Among these, St. Catherine in particular was used as an exemplar for women, a status which at times superseded her intercessory role. Both Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey de la Tour Landry point to Catherine as a paragon for young women, emphasizing her model of virginity and "wifely chastity."

St. Saturnina; Eglise de St. Saturnine, Sains-lès-Marquin (photo, echo62)

St. Sernin; Eglise St. Sernin, Merville

Finally, I came across another obscure saint by the name of Saint Saturnina, with a legend very much like what we have already seen. She was a king’s daughter and took a vow of celibacy at the age of 12. At twenty (the age if you recall, of the 9 sisters) she was forced into marriage. She escaped this unwanted marriage by fleeing to Arras in northern France. With her parent’s permission, the pagan lord chased her and upon catching up to her, attempted to rape her. She resisted and was beheaded.

Somehow, this offending noble miraculously drowned in a fountain. Saturnina then arose, carried her head in her hands (like Eumelia) to the church of St. Remi. An alternate take is that she placed her head upon a stone in Sains-lès- Marquion and declared she would be the last human sacrifice to be performed there. The tree planted on this spot allegedly still stands. Her relics were taken to Neuenheerse in Saxony and the Convent Church of St. Saturnina was built the between 1100 and 1130. Her feast day is June 4th.

Interestingly, images of Saint Saturnina have her flanked by a pair of what appear to be bulls, holding an object resembling the alabaster jar of Magdalene or even our Saintes Puelles. Her shrine contains a reliquary, flanked by two women, one of whom carries a book.  These women, as far as I can figure, are Saints Saturnina and Fortunata.  I don't know the latter's story, but Catholic Online describes her as a virgin martyr; killed in 303 CE in Ceasarea, now in modern Israel, along with three of her brothers.  I've had a difficult time finding details about her in English, but this manuscript description says: "From Caesarea in Palestine, St. Fortunata was a virgin martyr [who] surrendered her soul to God after she enduring the rack, fire, wild beasts, and other tortures in the time of the persecution of Diocletian".  It occurs to me that Diocletian reappears in many of our stories.  The Church appears to bear a grudge.

Reliquaries of Saint Saturnina and Fortunata (rear), Church of St. Saturnina, Bad-Driburg-Neuenheerse (photo, Wikimedia Commons)

Among the many questions this welter of information raises, I'd like to address but a few.

The first question is: what does all this have to do with the Saintes Puelles? First of all, the virgin martyr is a well-established type. Abbé Rous goes to great pains to establish that the very word "puelles" means in fact, just this. From the other holy virgins herein described there are important differences: there was no forced marriage and they were never executed, merely flogged and exiled.

Yet the fundamental pattern is the same. Even though the tale of the nine sisters revolves around the refusal to marry, there is another lesson in addition to preserved chastity; that is, the refusal to sully oneself by marrying a heathen. In some versions, the daughters refuse to acknowledge the pagan gods. And this is the precise "crime" of both Sernin and the Puelles. This was followed by punishment and then flight. In exile, the young women are very successful in spreading the faith.

The Saintes Pulles were also said in some cases to be sisters and some have even speculated that they were twins. Other legends have them as noblewoman and servant--from northern Spain.

If we examine the legends around the nine daughters, one is naturally inclined to wonder about the origin of these tales.  Were they based on a pre-existing pagan story and then embroidered upon in order to serve as a Christian morality tale? Was there in fact a real event so poignant in its details that it spread far and wide in various permutations? It surely reflects the social dislocation as the pagan world evolved into the Christian one and serves to illustrate and condemn the former for its barbarity.

Of course, the tale may have simply bee invented out of whole cloth by some bored monk. Although the tale of the Puelles and the 9 sisters all take place in late antiquity, mostly between the late fourth and early sixth centuries, the legends themselves first appeared much later and were diffused throughout the Romanesque and Medieval periods. They would have served to illustrate a number of spiritual values: chastity, courage, strength; they may have been used to impress young women with the virtue of abandoning the world of marriage and the world in favor of the monastic life.

The diffusion of the cult may have been communicated between monasteries, a tale told for the edification of far-flung parishes. The Benedictines reoccur in our tale; were these legends part of Benedictine culture? Their concentration in the southwest of France, from Toulouse to northern Portugal and Galicia, may indicate that the stories were communicated up and down the St. James Way. The Way itself has pre-Christian origins; the terminus at Compostela has been a gathering place for pilgrims since time immemorial. You may be aware that the south of France and the north of Spain traditionally have more in common with each other than with that with the north of France. The Visigoths had a capital at Toulouse and then Toledo; their kingdom was demarcated against the northern Franks.

This division lasted well into the Middle Ages. The culture of Languedoc had a different regard for women. Whatever didactic function they may have served, the tales certainly must have resonated among woman, whose lot in life was definitely difficult. Used since pagan times as a commodity, to be traded in marriage in order to cement alliances or consolidate territorial claims. The woman at all social levels must have been able to relate to the horrors of the forced marriage.

It is not unlikely, given the geographic concentration of the tales, that they were spread by the troubadours. The tragic fate of a woman would have certainly been an attractive theme and there are parallels between the tales and the ideals of courtly love:

That sort of history which views the early Middle Ages dominated by a prudish and patriarchal theocracy, views courtly love as a "humanist" reaction to the puritanical views of the Catholic Church. In the language of the scholars who endorse this view, courtly love is cherished for its exaltation of femininity as an ennobling, spiritual, and moral force, in contrast to the ironclad chauvinism of the first and second estates. The condemnation of courtly love in the beginning of the 13th century by the church as heretical, is seen by these scholars as the Church's attempt to put down this "sexual rebellion."

However, other scholars note that courtly love was certainly tied to the Church's effort to civilize the crude Germanic feudal codes in the late 11th century. It has also been suggested that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of more personal occurrences of romantic love, and thus it was not in reaction to the prudery or patriarchy of the Church but to the nuptial customs of the era that courtly love arose.

In our stories, however, courtly love is like an expression of divine love; our women would be those who had symbolically "wedded themselves to Christ." They could serve as a condemnation of a barbaric social order, a valorization of chastity and a nifty bit of publicity for the nunneries.

That varieties of this tale appear throughout Europe and the Orthodox world may be a reflection of the kind of geographic mobility of the troubadours, crusaders and pilgrims along the routes to Jerusalem, Compostela and Rome. Unsurprisingly, the versions which differ the most are found farther away from the versions promulgated in Gascony and Galicia. Saturnine and Wilgefortis, for example, cults found mostly in northern France, Belgium and Germany, are clearly based upon the nine sisters, but the differences are evident in both names and in the case of Saturnine, the geographical setting. But the tale and the moral lessons are essentially the same.

It is said that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned.  At this point I'll concur with the caveat that the abandonment is temporary.  We'll be back to this story soon enough.