Santo Domingo de Silos: The Cloister Where Our Fears Were Born

In its cloister still stands that symbol of immortality, the cypress tree to which the illustrious poet, Gerardo Diego, dedicated one of his celebrated sonnets. However, in our desire to present this symbol of a bygone era—which, in our opinion, was neither better nor worse, merely different—from a different perspective, we prefer to omit the more spiritual aspects of the four arcades that comprise it and focus on that strange, dreamlike vision conjured up by the stonemasons of the various guilds who worked here at the dawn of the 12th century. We wonder what passionate legends might have stirred the fevered imagination of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer had he exchanged the cloister of the Veruela Monastery for this one, situated in the frigid Castilian steppes: Santo Domingo de Silos.

Although the Cartesian heterodoxy of that celebrated godfather of the Knights Templar, Bernard of Clairvaux, saw in them the ever-present specter of absurdity, we, perhaps more inclined toward the world of speculation, go beyond the obscure motivations that transformed them into a style, "the Silos style," which spread through the churches of numerous regions in its time, to see in them the precursors—also immortal, like Gerardo Diego's cypress—of a supernatural storytelling that would give rise to those chilling tales of popular terrors that have terrified entire generations and that today, when we look at the universe with geopolitical yearnings, still continue to overwhelm us.

The gnome satyrs of Moncayo, the lethal nymphs of the Duero and the spectral warrior-monks of Monte de las Ánimas, become here, in this archaic Castilian monastery, the terrors that have always lurked in the dark corners of the human soul, hidden but vigilant in that forbidden universe that C. G. Jung called the Collective Unconscious: Hercules possessed by the homicidal fury of the centaurs when he murdered his children and was condemned by the Gods to perform the twelve impossible labors, some of them in Spain; Jason, when he faced the terrifying harpies, the forerunners of Bram Stoker's famous vampire, in his quest for the Golden Fleece through the lands of Colchis, and the pilgrims who, from the 9th century to the present day, continually encounter them at every landmark along the Way where they pause, so as not to forget that shadow that always accompanies us and which, at times, proves extremely difficult to restrain and exorcise.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my copyright.