Hermitages of mystery

It was first under the patronage of the Judeo-Christian Apollo, who, sometimes represented with a sword and a scale, becomes judge and party and whose presence is never missing in the altarpieces: the Archangel Saint Michael. But some time later, for reasons little or not at all clarified, he was relieved from the throne, yielding his prominence to a saint, whose enigmatic symbolism, like the Teutonic Odilia, did not go unnoticed by that wilful captain of the seas of the spirit, who, metaphorically and comparatively speaking, was Carl Gustav Jung: Lucy.

Frequently and significantly represented with her eyes on a tray, Saint Lucy is the Christian paradigm of inner vision; the Patron Saint of the navigators of the unconscious - as Baudelaire said: 'To the bottom of the Unknown, to find the new!' - who in those medieval times, dark for some and a little lighter for others, must have welcomed a parishioner, certainly disparate, where surely the rancid perfume of heterodoxy surprised with unpleasant whiffs to the official authority of the time.

Given its suspicious location, outside the walls of an important medieval town that was always jealous of its security behind the walls, it is quite possible that, observing the traffic of pilgrims, musicians, dancers, drinkers and even the occasional misguided astrologer and alchemist - it is said that Nicolas Flamel himself walked the Camino de Santiago looking for secret keys - which could well be taken as the precedent of the Fran?ois Villon of the future, some stonemason also noticed the details and took them as an example to immortalize them in one of its splendid doorways, far from the humility that characterizes this hermitage and which, over time, continues to exercise its silent mastery of mystery.

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