Death of a Pilgrim

PROLOGUE

The message carved in stone is very simple. It tells of a choice, a choice between eternity and salvation, a choice between paradise and the torments of the damned, a choice between heaven and hell. The work is divided into three horizontal sections. In the centre stands the largest figure of them all, Christ risen from the dead and wearing a long tunic with a scarf of white wool embroidered with black crosses, usually reserved for the Pope and certain church dignitaries. Above him is a cross carried by two angels holding a nail and a spear. His right hand points upwards and to his right. There a procession of the chosen ones, the Virgin Mary and St Peter, carrying the keys of the kingdom, lead the elect into paradise. On the strips of stone that divide the panels there are Latin inscriptions. For Peter and Mary and Abraham, seated with the other victors in this religious race, the message is clear: ‘Thus are given to the chosen who have won, the joys of heaven, glory, peace, rest and eternal light.’

On the other side of the work there is neither peace nor glory nor eternal light. Christ’s left hand points to the left and sharply downwards. Beneath him is a panel enclosed by two doors, one ornate and graceful with two keyholes for the locks, the other with heavy metal supports and no keyholes. The chosen are led by the hand to heaven’s gate, but in front of the gateway to hell diabolical monsters pummel the damned and force them into the vast open jaws of Leviathan: in the words of the Book of Isaiah, ‘Sheol, the land of the damned, gapes with straining throat and has opened her measureless jaws: down go nobility and the mobs and the rabble rousers.’ Presiding over hell is Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, with a hideous grimace, bulging eyes and short hair pleated to resemble a crown. To his left a miser or a thief has been hung up with a pouch of hoarded or stolen money wrapped round his neck, killed by the weight of his own greed. To his right a messenger devil is whispering into Lucifer’s ear the news of the latest torments in his kingdom. Lucifer’s legs are adorned with serpents and his feet are pressing down to hold a sinner being roasted on a brazier. In the panel above, an abbot is holding on to his crozier, prostrate in front of a deformed and bestial demon. In his net the demon has captured three other false monks and is preparing further torture. Behind him, a heretic, his lips shut and a closed book in his hand, is having his mouth crushed while a demon devours his skull. To the right a false banker or moneychanger is about to atone for his sins. A demon is melting the metal in a fire. He is tilting back the false banker or moneychanger’s head and preparing to make him swallow the liquid of his infamy. A king has been stripped naked and a demon is preparing to pull him off his throne with his jaws. A glutton has been hung upside down with a pulley and forced to vomit his excesses into a bowl while another fiend prepares to beat his feet with an axe. There is a couple taken in adultery and fornication, possibly a monk and a nun, now tied together for ever with a rope joining their heads at the neck. The sins of pride and power are here in stone. A knight in an expensive mailcoat has been forced upside down by a demon pushing a pole into his back. Another seems to be trying to tear his arms off. A scandalmonger, forced to sit in a fire, the flames licking round his waist, is having his tongue pulled out. A glutton with an enormous belly is going head first into a piece of kitchen equipment, a cauldron or a boiling casserole. Love of money, love of power, love of women who are not your wife, love of gossip are all portrayed here, surrounded by demons with fire and snakes and pulleys and axes and prongs to welcome you into hell. ‘The wicked’, the inscription proclaims, ‘suffer the torments of the damned, roasting in the middle of flames and demons, perpetually groaning and trembling.’

These scenes are carved in the tympanum, the space above the doorway, in the Abbey Church of Conques in southern France. They were put in place early in the twelfth century, possibly around 1115. For a couple of hundred years they would have acted as inspiration and warning, threat and reward, to the tens of thousands of pilgrims passing through Conques on their journey to Santiago de Compostela, the field of stars on the north-western coast of Spain, final resting place and shrine of St James the Apostle, which was the ultimate destination of one of Europe’s most important pilgrimages. As they came into the great square in front of the church in Conques the pilgrims would have stared in awe, and possibly terror, at this visible representation of the likely fate of all their souls in the world to come.

And now, in this year of Our Lord 1906, another group of pilgrims, bringing perhaps the same hopes and the same vices, are preparing to set out on the same pilgrims’ path to Santiago and stand in front of the great tympanum at Conques. For them, as for their predecessors eight hundred years earlier, the inscription at the bottom of the sculpture still rings true: ‘Oh sinners, if you do not mend your ways, know that you will suffer a dreadful fate.’