I had heard about the medieval pilgrimage path years before from a friend. Her emails sent from the Camino about “ascending to the clouds” during the morning hike and then hanging out in albergues with funny Dutch cyclists in the evening had me hooked. I knew if I ever got the chance, I wanted to do it, too. In 2010, I decided to seize the opportunity of being in Madrid as a foreign student exchange for just that purpose.
But once I started to seriously plan, I had second thoughts. I’m religious, raised in a very Catholic household with a lot of traditional practices, which I loved, including visiting shrines. I knew pilgrimage didn’t have to include walking. I had never walked to a shrine. In Rome, too, the pope gives public welcome to various groups during his weekly Angelus address, greeting them as pilgrims and most, if not all, have been dropped off in St. Peter’s Square by a tour bus. The millions of people who go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land or Marian shrines throughout the world do so almost exclusively with the help of planes, trains, and automobiles. Even regarding Santiago de Compostela, the plenary indulgence of the Jacobean Holy Years isn’t tied to walking The Camino, not even a single step. If I had wanted to, I could have taken a bus from Madrid straight to Santiago de Compostela, arrived for lunch, said my prayers in the cathedral, and had my purgatory time wiped out by dinner. Instead, I was planning to take a train to France, then catch a bus to the isolated town of Saint Jean Pied du Port, and then spend a month walking the 500 miles I had intentionally put between me and the shrine of St. James.
In this context, the dynamic of the Camino niggled at me as somewhat more contrived and artificial than I had initially imagined it. To quiet my uncertainty, I decided to route my trip first to Lourdes, a Marian shrine in the Pyrenees I had visited years before and did think fondly of returning to. There, now my pilgrimage route went in a more or less coherent circle, I thought. Still, as I walked the Camino–very much enjoying the adventure that had so attracted me in the first place–my other question only deepened. Let me illustrate.
One evening, I arrived very late at the village I had made my destination for that day, Rabanal del Camino, still about a nine-day walk from Santiago. I went to the municipal albergue, which sits in the main plaza of the village, across the square from two other private albergues. Also in the plaza had parked a large charter bus. At the entrance to the municipal albergue, I found another pilgrim I had walked with often waiting. He too had just reached the village. He told me there were no beds left in the several albergues in the village, but the hospitalera was seeing what she could do.
“Tourists,” he muttered, tossing his head knowingly toward the bus behind us.
If my memory serves me, it must have been July 12 or so, and the closer we got to Santiago, the more groups we encountered. They, like us, were planning to be in the city for the feast of St. James on July 25. Unlike us, they traveled with a support bus and reservations at hostels. As annoying as I sometimes found the overcrowding such groups contributed to, I could see no fundamental reason why they were pilgrims any less than I. Hadn’t we all left home to go to Santiago de Compostela?
Or had we? Were any of us really so much on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela as we were “doing the Camino?”
I hear the initial reaction: I don’t see a significant difference. It’s still a pilgrimage. Pilgrims have been walking it for centuries! It's deeply spiritual and symbolic! Well, yes, perhaps, but we often fail to realize just how modern a conception The Way of St. James, El Camino de Santiago, or The Camino are, and, as a consequence, all follows.
(Me hiking in Idaho a couple of years after I did The Camino)
The Non-Existent Medieval Pilgrim’s Path
I think most people realize intuitively at least that medieval pilgrims were not following little yellow arrows and stylized conch shell across Spain. But let’s drill down further to see just how different the modern concept of The Camino is from the medieval one. Yes, the principal medieval documents surrounding the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, namely the 12th-century Codex Calixtinus, does include the part known as the “pilgrim’s guide” which provides information about traveling to Santiago de Compostela overland from France, including a list of cities and details about the food and people in each region of Spain. While in some ways it reads very much like a modern guidebook but in other ways it's incredibly vague. “Four roads meet at Puente la Reina in Spain and become one route to Santiago,” the manuscript begins, as translated from the original Latin on this website. In fact, this translation is very funny. It translates everything into English except for using the modern euphemism “Camino,” in Spanish and capitalized. Now the original manuscript was written in Latin and without modern punctuation, and I don’t read Latin. But I am pretty good with Spanish, and this Spanish translation does no such insertion of modern mentalities into the medieval manuscript. There is no mention of El Camino de Santiago, simply los caminos de Santiago. Bear in mind camino can be translated as way or road, and as anyway familiar with traveling in Europe knows, roads and highways on that continent are designated as much by their destinations as they are by a modern numbering system, a reflection of the medieval mentalities and conventions. Finally, as the Spanish translators of the Codex Calixtinus note, in France (and a Frenchmen is considered the most likely author of the Codex Calixtinus) places were often referenced simply by the saint buried there.
In other words, when this medieval writer wrote about how to get to Santiago de Compostela, he was simply giving directions and describing regular roads, not a specially designated, quasi-sacred pilgrim’s path that can be capitalized and promoted as The Way of St. James. Ellen O. Feinberg, an anthropologist who did the Camino in 1982, explains how what we today call The Camino actually functioned in the days of yore.
“To assist the pilgrimage traffic, and resettlement of the north, and trade, and agriculture, and troop movement, kings, nobles, and clergy had the old Roman roads repaired, new roads built, new bridges constructed,” she writes in her memoir, Follow the Milky Way: A Pilgrimage Across Spain. “By the twelfth century specific routes had been developed across France and Spain, the routes described in the Codex, routes which still serve as the basis for modern pilgrimage guides and tourists brochures. The routes were lined with famous shrines, with monasteries and hospices just a day apart. Pilgrims could travel safely along these routes assured of company, food and shelter.”
Pilgrims shared the same road, the same journey, the same lodgings, the same means of transportation as the rest of humanity traveling westward across Spain at that time. They were, in the end, simply part of the mix of travelers along the many roads that led to Santiago de Compostela, even if during a certain epoch they were as annoyingly numerous as moderns tourists heading to the beach. In this sense, for medieval pilgrims everything that happened along the way was, well, the stuff that happened on the way, even if part of the spiritual exercise of pilgrimage. In the Christian tradition there have long been various kinds of pilgrimage, as the medieval historian R.A. Fletcher notes. The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela followed the kind of pilgrimage where the believer went to a holy place, a place where the poser of God was intensely tangible manifest, a place where miracles had occurred. Almost always this was a church where a saint was buried or some part of his body had been brought to—a shrine—as the bodies of dead saints were held to be powerful conduits of God’s grace. While the entire journey had a spiritual significance, reaching the destination marked the highlight of the trip. There at the shrine prayers were answered, sins forgiven, inner renewal experienced. Then the pilgrim returned home, taking with him a souvenir that served both as proof of having reached the shrine and, having been touched to grave of the saint as a means of taking a bit of the divine power home with him. Medieval pilgrims didn’t spend there time in the shrine of St. James analysing The Camino, no they pushed and shoved to get as close to the actual tomb as they could.
Us moderns, though, we leave home solely motivated by The Way. We want to get to The Way, we want to walk it or do The Camino. We think The Way itself is the place of spiritual renewal. Getting to Santiago simply marks the end of our time on The Camino, and can actually be felt as anti-climatic and the experiences of The Way a bit confusing. Such disorientation happens more often than we want to acknowledge.
For example, a group of Irish nuns runs a ministry in Santiago de Compostela called Camino Companions. Working out of the pilgrim welcome office of the archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela, they help pilgrims process their experiences on The Camino. The tagline in the flyers they post states, “Had the experience but missed the meaning?” This can happen even to very traditionally religious and devout Camino walkers. For example, in explaining her Camino experience to the Catholic news site Crux, Annie Hinnenkamp seemed a bit disillusioned. Her trek to Santiago could have been that of any pilgrim throughout the ages. She enjoyed the camaraderie of other pilgrims but found the travel–walking–more difficult than anticipated as she suffered an upset stomach most of the trip, making it hard to eat. Another disappointment was not being able to attend Catholic mass along the way, as many villages didn’t have a daily liturgy or it was offered at a time that made it difficult to attend.
“I was expecting to see God in so many ways, especially with the fact that he ordained all of us (she and her siblings) to go at the same time.,” she told the journalist.
Then, almost by chance, she wanders into the cathedral on the feast of St. James just when mass is starting. There, she finally puts it all together as “memories flooded over her from the trip. With hindsight, she realized the Lord had been present at moments she had not recognized.”
The absence of any mention of St. James is notable. This is not meant to disparage modern pilgrims. They are no less pious than their medieval ancestors but they are making a very different kind of pilgrimage. As a friend who is a theologian expressed it to me, the Camino is a “pilgrimage experience.” But if you want to have a “pilgrimage experience” why not just go on a pilgrimage? Isn’t every pilgrimage a pilgrimage experience?
Here I have laid out the questions that surround The Camino. This newsletter will explore The Camino and pilgrimage generally in depth. We will look at how Christian pilgrimage first developed, how it has changed over time, spiritual conceptions of pilgrimage, the cult of the saints, the modern revival of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, tradition, enchantment, festivity, and more. We will analyse our age through the Camino —how how we went from pilgrimage to Camino, from pilgrimage to tourist. And how we might once again become authentic pilgrims (and why we’re obsessed with authenticity, anyway?) I will stray off The Cmaino occasionally too for wider context and related, interesting stories. I will refrain from boring my reader with didactic conclusions and stick to telling stories of times both past and present. Much of the material here will be reworked from my master’s thesis but will also pull from my now six years living on The Camino.
Personally, I find the history of the pilgrimage to St. James fascinating. I hope reading the story proves enjoyable for all readers and helpful for pilgrims of all kinds. It’ll come out bit by bit once a week.
Thank you for coming along. Buen Camino!
