by Jan Morris
18 The mountain
I am sure that sages long before St Patrick frequented the mountain called Croagh Patrick, on the west coast of Ireland in County Mayo, from whose summit the saint expelled all serpents from the island. It is the epitome of a holy rock, with Druidical associations too. The Irish call it ‘The Reek’, and it rises bare and bold from the sea-coast, overlooking a bay littered with a hundred islands. Nowadays the crowds who make the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage on the last Sunday in July ostensibly make the climb in search of Christian solace, but when I joined them I am sure I was not alone in feeling instincts far more elemental. We could hardly claim to be aspiring to the sun or the moon – we could scarcely see the top of the mountain itself for the rain – but we were certainly in intimate contact with the rocks.
Some 20,000 of us made the climb. We would have been more, I was told, were it not for a Roscommon – Mayo football match being played that afternoon. At the bottom of the mountain tinkers and their boys sold us rough-cut sticks – ‘Reek Sticks’ in the vernacular – and all that day, huddled in anoraks against the drizzle, the pilgrims set off up the mass of the mountain, some alone, some in groups, some laughing and singing, some saying Hail Marys all the way. It was like moving with the crowd along a city shopping pavement. There were imps and there were elders. There were rugged old ladies. There were teams of soldiers in uniform. Some of the tinkers loped along on the edge of the crowd, and prancing urchins brandished their sticks. Many zealots climbed barefoot, with facial expressions of excruciating dedication and blood mixed with mud oozing from their toes. Halfway up was easy, but then we saw in front of us, stretching away into the mist and rain, a steep wall of rubble with no track at all. ‘Jesus,’ said a man beside me, ‘will you look at that?’ They call the scree ‘Hell before Heaven’, and up it we laboured gritting our teeth. Sometimes people fell over; often they stood still and silent, breathing heavily, praying for help or trying to make up their minds whether to give up or go on. Occasionally stretcher men came stumbling down with casualties, bloodied and bandaged, pour encourager les autres. ‘When you get to the top,’ said my man, ‘your soul will be cleansed, and you can start sinning all over again.’
And sure enough at the top, in a small glass-fronted oratory, non-stop masses were being said, the amplified voices of the priests strangely thudding through the mist, while a crowd of pilgrims milled around the summit. Some were buying tea and buns at ad-hoc refreshment stands. Some were queuing to make their confessions. Some wearily made the statutory seven circuits of the stone called St Patrick’s Bed – bumping now and then into me, until I realized I was circuiting the wrong way round. I loved the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, bruised and breathless though I was. ‘Your first time?’ sympathetic voices kept asking me, when at last I slumped heavily on the ground to eat a sandwich, and I told them yes; but I didn’t feel it was, any more than I have ever felt a stranger to those warm donkey-rocks at home.
19 The last pagans
The best place of all to sense the lingering power of the old gods is Lithuania, which was the last European country to accept Christianity – thirteen centuries after the birth of Christ. So inescapable still are signs and echoes of the old beliefs that I sometimes think the Lithuanians are not entirely free of their paganism even now. Reminders of Perkūnas, the Thunder-God, are everywhere, and sometimes images of him too: a formidable Thunder-God figure, a true idol, stands in a square at Kaunas, the former capital of the country, and the cathedral below the castle at Vilnius, the central national symbol, occupies the site of a temple in his honour (there is said to be a pagan altar somewhere among its foundations, but during a long chill tour among the miscellaneous coffins, corpses and sacred relics stored down there I failed to discover it). In 1996 they erected in the cathedral square a statue of one of the supreme national heroes, Grand Duke Gediminas, the founder of the city. This was specifically conceived both as a riposte to the style of the Soviet Russians who had ruled the country until a few years before, and as a declaration of national meaning. It is my favourite equestrian statue in the world – partly because the Duke is not galloping triumphantly into the sunset, as he would be if the Communists had made him, but simply stands beside his horse’s head in a posture of generous magnanimity; partly because it was erected directly above an ancient holy stone of the pagans.
Not far away, off a quiet backstreet, is the small redbrick church of St Nicolas. It is a fine little building, secluded within its surrounding walls, and very stalwart. So it had to be. It was built by the German merchant community of the city in the early years of the fourteenth century, well before the conversion of the Lithuanians to Christianity. Those pious Germans, when they assembled for Sunday service, knew that the heathen were all around them, with their sacred rocks and trees and springs, and old Perkūnas was being worshipped with who knew what profane and horrid rites up the road below the castle.
20 The Hill of Crosses
Even the site most profoundly sacred to Lithuanian Catholics seems to me to reflect convictions older than Christ. Kryži Kalnas, the Hill of Crosses, is another famous symbol both of religious devotion and of national pride. It is the strangest place. Since the early nineteenth century at least, and probably far, far longer, people have regarded it as holy. Over the generations they have implanted its mound with a tangled forest of crosses, of wood, of iron, of stone, tall carved crosses, crosses made of old pipes, crosses exquisitely sculpted, crosses in rows, crosses in clusters, crosses piled and stacked there in an indistinguishable jumble. Around almost every cross hundreds of lesser crosses are hung, together with tangled masses of rosaries, and between them little alleys have been trampled by the pilgrims who come here in an endless flow from every corner of Lithuania. The whole hillock looks molten, as if all its myriad symbols have somehow been fused together, leaving jagged protrusions everywhere. There is an overpowering sense of mystic primitivism to this place, and as a pantheist I myself honour it as much for its abstract holiness as for its Christian meaning. In the days of Soviet rule in Lithuania the Communists loathed it either way. They rightly saw it as a focus of patriotic defiance, too, and did their surly best to put an end to it. They bulldozed away some 6,000 of its crosses, and forbade the erection of any more, but of course it did them no good. Patriots and pietists crept in there at night and planted new crosses anyway, and since the collapse of Communism thousands more have gone up, spreading out across the meadows about the mound; even as I stood there one afternoon thinking about it all, on the banks of the little reedy stream which runs nearby, I heard on the quiet pastoral air a pounding from somewhere in the thicket of crosses, as yet another was hammered in. How could a measly local commissar prevail against the combined forces of Christ, patriotism and Perkūnas the Thunder-God?
21 In a class by herself
Long ago Christianity won in Europe, triumphing over diverse permutations of paganism, displacing the whole pantheon of the Greeks and Romans, humiliating all the Perkūnases, surviving countless heresies and schisms of its own. ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’ wrote Sir James Frazer, in 1880, imagining the angelus sounding on the wind from Rome over the Temple of the Golden Bough at Nemi. Glass weakened the primeval power of stone, and a new order of divine beings took over. They are with us still. I have more than once encountered people who have seen the Virgin Mary, and once met a lady who had come across Jesus Christ himself. They had, however, never actually spoken to these holy persons, who had crossed their paths in stately silence, so in 1994 I was excited to discover, during a visit to the pilgrimage site of Fátima in Portugal, that the legendary Sister Lúcia, who had enjoyed long conversations with the Holy Mother in 1917, was still alive. She was in a class by herself among Christian seers of her time. Her accounts of the miraculous encounters had made Fátima one of the great shrines of Christendom – it was the headquarters of the Blue Armada, an anti-atheist movement alleged to have tens of millions of members in more than 100 countries. Also she was the
keeper of the mysterious Third Secret, something either so awful or so banal that it had never been revealed to the world, but was known only to Popes and innermost confidants of the Vatican: shut away, as Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office, said in 1960, ‘in one of those archives which are like a very deep, dark well, to the bottom of which papers fall and nobody is able to see them any more’, and so tantalizingly mysterious that in 1981 a former Trappist monk hijacked an Irish airliner in an unsuccessful attempt to force its extraction. Sister Lúcia was almost certain to be beatified after her death, and the vast basilica at Fátima, attended by a ceremonial square twice as large as St Peter’s Square in Rome, stood ever ready for her funeral.
A priest at Fátima told me all this, and when he happened to remark in the course of conversation that Sister Lúcia was alive and well at a convent at Coimbra, I did not waste a moment. Sister Lúcia! A prodigious and fateful mystery in herself, who was likely to be honoured for ever and ever, who had lived a life of magical revelation, whose tomb awaited her within that mighty church, whose sainthood was assured, whose Third Secret lay immured in a bottomless archive and was hijacked for by Trappists! Within the hour I was at the door of her Carmelite convent, where she had lived with her memories and her Secret for almost half a century.
I did not meet her, though, and perhaps it was all to the good. What would I have said to her? I was only an inquisitive pagan. The young nun who opened the convent door, revealing a cadaverous hall suggestively within, regretted that Sister Lúcia could not talk to me, even through a grille. I mumbled something about only wishing to have her blessing: but I was prevaricating, and the young nun knew it.
22 Seeing things
It was a colossal event when the Holy Mother appeared to Sister Lúcia at Fátima in 1917; Bernadette of Lourdes saw Our Lady in 1858, became a saint, and had a movie made about her; but by the later years of the twentieth century holy apparitions were all the rage among European Christians. It was a sign of the times, perhaps. The sudden prevalence of sacred visions and miracles in many parts of the continent went well with the taste for Unidentified Flying Objects and other Unsolved Mysteries of the television culture. In Italy innumerable Madonna images were seen to weep tears of water or of blood, although the Church itself recognized the authenticity of only one, and scientists dismissed them all as frauds or natural phenomena. Ireland proved to be the great place for your Moving Virgins, and sacred statues all over the island miraculously shook and swayed, sometimes attended by insubstantial visitants delivering didactic messages about divorce and clean living. I looked in one rainy afternoon at a Marian grotto among a dark grove of trees at Cappoquin in County Waterford, where an image of the Virgin had repeatedly moved, been transfigured and made pronouncements, such as ‘The World Must Behave’, ‘Thanks for the Hymns’ or ‘The People Must Go to Mass More.’ A solitary family sat there doggedly in the wet, in a kind of gazebo above the grotto: mother, father, adult son and daughter, they waited there as in trance, clutching rosaries and staring fixedly at the statue on its rock, willing it to shift perhaps, praying for a sacred manifestation, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around, and dripped heavily off the roof of the gazebo.
The most baffling of these visitations was the marvel of Medjugorje, a hill-hamlet in Bosnia where a group of children, in 1981, claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Ever afterwards they reported almost daily access to the Madonna, nobody being able to shake their evidence, and although the Catholic hierarchy disassociated itself from the affair, the hamlet became another of Europe’s great pilgrimage places. Throughout the wars in Yugoslavia (which did not reach Medjugorje, considered by the faithful a miracle in itself) pilgrims came from many parts of the world in the hope of sharing the visionaries’ experience or, as second best, seeing a subsidiary phenomenon, the dancing of the sun. By the time I got there the little cluster of houses in the mountains had become one of your archetypal Christian shrines, in the Fátima tradition (the Medjugorje children were given Secrets, too). A brand-new sanctuary had been built, with two square towers, and around it on the bleak and stony site had arisen all the essentials of the pilgrim destination – bazaar-like shops aglitter with holy trinkets, pizza restaurants, heaps of bed-and-breakfast places, gas stations, taxi ranks, banks. Several million people, I was assured, had gone to Medjugorje since the original visions, but on my winter day there you would never guess it. It was drizzling there, too. The sanctuary was empty. The shops were deserted. The taxis waited forlorn at their ranks. I went to the Hill of Apparitions, where the children had first seen their visions, and there up the stony track I saw my only pilgrims, clambering under a line of black umbrellas towards the sacred summit. The rain poured down, the clouds scudded overhead, and even for the most visionary the sun of Medjugorje did no dancing.
23 An Irish eyewitness account of the sun dancing,quoted in Carmina Gadelica, by Alexander Carmichael, 1900
The glorious bright-red sun was after rising on the crest of the great hills, and it was changing colour – green, purple, red, blood-red, white, intense white, and gold-white, like the glory of God of the elements to the children of men. It was dancing up and down in exaltation …
24 Toenails
Another phenomenon of my European years has been the appearance of a highly mobile Pope, riding around in a vehicle called a Popemobile which has always reminded me of the glass cage Adolf Eichmann sat in during his death-trial in Jerusalem. The Polish Pope John Paul II is a terrific traveller, a terrific showman too, and for the first time he brought the mysterious power of his office into every part of Europe – who could possibly have guessed, fifty years ago, that a Pope would ever come to Cardiff? I have never met a Pope, but I was acquainted with an Archbishop of Canterbury once. We shared a birthday – with Gandhi, too – and we also shared the circumstance that every five years or so the big toenails of our right feet came off. His had been damaged in a tank during the Second World War, mine by a block of ice in the Himalaya. He was the spiritual head of some 70 million Anglicans throughout the world, with 800 archbishops and bishops, but I have to say that I never found myself daunted by his eminence. It might have been a different matter if I had shared a disposable toenail with a Pope, because even in the mind of an animist the Bishop of Rome has some transcendent majesty. Canterburys come and go, and retire as it were to their maiden names, but a Pope is a Pope for ever. The Pope is the Big Time. Nearly 900 million Catholics pay allegiance to the Pope. There have been venerated relics in cathedrals, bowed to by cardinals, honoured by princes, less majestic than the toenail of a Pope.
25 A dead Pope
I saw a dead Pope once, and he was refulgent even in corpsehood. Pope Pius X had been Patriarch of Venice before his ascension, and when I was living in that city in 1959 he paid a posthumous revisit to his old patriarchate. We watched his passing from our balcony over the Grand Canal. Embalmed though he was by then, he moved by with infinite condescension. Gondolas full of priests came first, cushioned deep in their seats and rowed by white-robed gondoliers. Then came a series of dream-like barges, their velvet draperies trailing in the water behind. And finally in a blaze of gold came the Bucintoro, successor to the magnificent State barge of the doges of Venice, rowed by a crew of tough young sailors to the beat of a drum. Bells rang, plainchants sounded from loudspeakers across the city, and to the solemn boom, boom of the drum the cadaver of the Holy Father, flat on his back in a crystal coffin, sailed by as to the manner dead.
26 A live Pope
In life too a Pope still has an aura all his own, and to my mind the best of all European pilgrimages remains the Easter pilgrimage to St Peter’s Square in Rome to witness His Holiness speaking to his 900 million across the world. It may be a hackneyed spectacle, even a cliché among ceremonies, and what the Pope says is unlikely to set hearts on fire, but the very predictability of it is half its strength. It is as it always ha
s been. ‘Upon this rock!’ The immense good-humoured crowd, disgorged from a myriad coaches, walking leisurely up the Via della Conciliazione, seeping out of the back-quarters of the Vatican, contains all the requisite nuns, pasty-faced seminarians, Poles, American tourist groups, Irish enthusiasts, backpackers, enormously old arthritic ladies and couples from England on All-Inclusive Easter Breaks. The Swiss Guard, though not quite so stalwart nowadays as their reputation says they used to be, still look stylish in their sixteenth-century liveries, with pikes over their shoulders. The soldiers who turn up on parade march about with the true Italian military panache of tossing feathers and high-pitched bands. There are the statutory television cameras all over the place, and properly fussy chaplains appear now and then on the papal balcony to mess about with the lectern, adjust the microphone and look important.
