“When the count was going to die, he ordered that he be buried next to his second wife, next to the lady, and that that soul brush be placed at the foot of the tomb in memory of the crime he committed.” This phrase is part of a dialogue between the actors José María Caffarel and Julio Núñez in the film the housedirected by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador in 1966, within the series Stories to keep you from sleeping of Spanish Television. Although stories like this one, linked to fear and death, had a huge impact on the Spanish channel, some of their terms are incomprehensible today. What does Caffarel mean when he talks about that “bore brush”? The current lack of knowledge of rituals as deeply rooted in the rural world as the cult of blessed souls has a date of origin, the middle of the last century, and a set of well-defined reasons: the appearance of television, literacy and emigration ended with traditions transmitted orally.
The analysis corresponds to Juan Francisco Blanco, researcher and former director of the Institute of Identities, based in Salamanca. For decades he has consolidated a personal theory that may surprise more than one: “No matter how much Spanish culture is presented as vitalist, deep down it hides that we are a culture of death.” The professor refers to obvious examples, known to everyone, such as the celebration, from north to south, of Holy Week, where “we revel in the pain, we are more interested in the Christ who bleeds than in the one who comes back to life.” ” or in the celebration of animal sacrifice. Aside from rituals such as bullfights or pig slaughter, some towns still preserve a sweetened version (without death) of celebrations linked to male initiation, such as cockfights.
Nowadays, what was so familiar and natural, particularly in the towns, has been left behind and only some rising phenomena, such as necrotourism, have taken over. This type of tourism – which consists of guided tours of cemeteries to see the location of illustrious tombs and other curiosities – is already an ancient activity in large capitals, such as Paris or Prague, and today it is presented in our culture as an excellent opportunity, not only to expand on the knowledge of the past, but to try to break the firm taboo that society has built around death.
The “touch of souls”
In any case, when current generations approach celebrations that only survive in part of inland Spain—in towns in Galicia, León, Zamora, Salamanca or Extremadura—something is wrong. The cult of blessed souls was greatly enhanced at the Council of Trent (16th century), which gave rise to the appearance of a multitude of brotherhoods of souls (organizations that were responsible for the funeral of their deceased members and praying for their souls) and of other rites, particularly striking, such as the mozas de animas.
“There is a cultural fossil of this custom in the Salamanca town of La Alberca, where a woman goes out into the street at sunset praying for blessed souls, although this phenomenon existed throughout the Sierra de Francia and the Las Hurdes area, north of Extremadura,” explains the expert, who was able to confirm this reality after analyzing the famous Survey of the Ateneo de Madrid, which asked Spaniards about their customs of birth, marriage and death in the years 1901 and 1902.
During the celebration of Samaín, the Celts believed that a great door was opened between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a space stimulated by the consumption of alcohol as a ritual element.
That examination of the data revealed the roots in a much more rural Spain of celebrations linked to death, such as devotion to souls. Repeated testimonies speak of the habit of people who went out at night to pray to the deceased, while the ringing of bells was frequent in the late afternoon – coinciding with the end of the working day – to remember the dead. A touch that, by the way, was called “touch of souls”. “We are talking about a traditional culture where death was perfectly embedded in daily life and was part of the landscape: the dead were kept awake at home and children could run around the room around the body of the deceased,” explains Juan Francisco Blanco.
If today it is evident that death is a taboo, in the past the relationship was closer, although without reaching the philosophy of ancestral cultures. For example, it is known that, during the Samain celebration, the Celts believed that a great door opened between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a space stimulated by the consumption of alcohol as a ritual element. Surely older people remember customs from the Night of the Dead in the towns, which were carried out by the young men, such as ringing or “stringing” the bells. “There are documents from the 18th and 19th centuries where you can see that our ancestors thought that the sound of the bells functioned as a kind of acoustic wall against the spirits of the dead,” says Blanco. That is, the complete opposite of the Celts.
It is true that some towns in emptied Spain still preserve the echo of these traditions so deeply rooted in the past. Although it is in art and heritage, like much of the Spain that left, where they are best preserved. Just look at the churches in the towns, and their roads. When it believed in the existence of purgatory, the Church promoted a very precise and abundant iconography of the cult of souls. As reflected in the works of Juan Francisco Blanco, author of the book Sleeping death. Funerary culture in traditional Spain (University of Valladolid, 2005), the representation of souls trying to escape from the burning fire of hell together with their great mediator, the Virgin of Carmen, was common.
Chapels in extinction
The other unquestionable memory of the cult of the souls of the deceased remains, battered, on many roads in the north, and is especially common in Asturias and Galicia (where the Celtic substratum is more present). They are the soul chapels, small altars located at crossroads that were often built by individuals. They housed a brush inside to collect alms, which were used in celebrating masses in memory of the deceased and in maintaining the buildings themselves. The architect Juan Pedrayes Obaya defines them, in a small study, as very poor elements, of popular construction, with common characteristics, such as a cross painted on the interior, along with the motto “Pray to God for the souls in purgatory.”
We must fight against the current, these chapels are part of our culture, our myths and our history; If they disappear we will have lost something of our cultural heritage
Juan Pedrayes Obaya
— architect
“The future of these small chapels is certainly difficult, devotion to souls tends to disappear,” points out the architect, in reference to the altars analyzed in the Asturian town of Villaviciosa. However, there are other, much more worrying reasons for this eventual extinction. The theft of alms has discouraged the families who were in charge of maintaining them, while the funds to raise funds have been withdrawn. “We must fight against the current, these chapels are part of our culture, our myths and our history; If they disappear, we will have lost something of our cultural heritage that, ultimately, belongs to all the people of Villavicios,” he reflects, within a local context that, with certainty, can be extrapolated to other architectural manifestations of this nature in the north of the country.
More popular and in an impeccable state of conservation is the famous ossuary of the church of Santa María de la O, in the Valladolid town of Wamba. There, the temple’s guide service presents the space—which preserves bone remains of nearly 3,000 people, from between the 9th and 17th centuries—as “a chapel of souls.” Juan Francisco Blanco believes that, although it may have served to remember the souls of the deceased, the chapel attached to the temple of Visigothic origin is, in reality, only a “non-chaotic” ossuary, that is, with thousands of assembled bones covering its walls. It is worth remembering that, until the end of the 18th century, the deceased were buried inside churches. Later, after the decree of Charles III (1777), this practice was prohibited and the situation led to the creation of cemeteries, in whose ossuaries ancient or anonymous remains were stored to avoid collapsing the space.
The missing link
Despite the deep roots of traditions linked to death in rural Spain – which intensified every year around this time – the cult of souls ended up declining after the mid-20th century. Juan Francisco Blanco explains that the appearance in 1956 of the television, which the residents of the towns accessed through the teleclubs “even though they were not even connected by road” had a perverse effect: “Those people began to watch different forms of television on television.” to eat, to express themselves, to dance… and that made them begin to feel ashamed of their own and, what is worse, to throw away their own identity.”
Television came, however, accompanied by other determining factors, such as emigration. That rural Spain, encouraged by the Franco regime, began to abandon the towns to work in the industrialized centers of the Basque Country and Catalonia, opening a generational fissure. “The oral tradition that kept these rituals alive works like a chain, from generation to generation; If a link is broken, in some way the guidelines are established so that all that inheritance disappears,” argues the expert. The literacy process that began in the 1930s with the Second Republic is the third of these ingredients. “The culture of young people was what they inherited from their parents and grandparents; When they start going to school, children learn new things and begin to put that inheritance aside,” adds Blanco.
But, beyond the soul girl of La Alberca, the ringing of bells in some towns and the bas-reliefs where souls suffer the winter fire, is there any more living vestige of those beliefs? After a decade traveling through towns in Castilla y León, Juan Francisco Blanco reveals something more than an anecdote. “Instead of using an alarm clock or the phone alarm, there are still older people who entrust themselves to blessed souls to wake up; All those people I have spoken to tell me that their souls have never failed them.”
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