And as well as the pasts there is a present, the time of feet aching and sun beating down, or rain driving, the present of which the pilgrim is now and always was (whenever) more than usually aware, the present of hard physical slog and the crawling pace of feet across a land big, too big to imagine, too big an experience to pack into one memory even in the century of mass travel and flight faster than sound.
As a pilgrim you are never quite sure what world you are in. You left behind the life you lived before, and it is done with; you are in a strange time, the time of the angels, a time when all you have to do is walk. Dates become meaningless; a day is merely the passing of the sun from one hand to the other, from behind you to in front. The pilgrim has given up reading the papers, the pilgrim has given up doing work; the pilgrim is just one big foot marching from one place to another, one great yearning for the end and goal.
You slough off your things first. You reduce the weight of your pack. That old paperback gets each page ripped out and thrown away as you read it. The great basque cheese gets eaten slowly, oozes into a smaller space. The interesting guide book is given away. Only the essential remains. You add the useful thing - the sun block, the cornplasters - and throw away the useless - the pair of split trousers, the too dirty shirt, the too heavy stick.
Then you slough off your worries. There is only one thing to worry about now and that is whether you and your feet will last the day. Slowly the walking winds you down to its steady rhythm. Your pace is that of the landscape slowly unfolding. You disappear from normal life, or it disappears from you.
There's a strange sort of feel to a pilgrimage. Though you are living entirely in the present, it's not the present which matters; what matters is the distant goal, even the distance itself. It's a nomadic existence, as the life of the medieval knight was; the pilgrimage, the crusade, the adventures of Grailhunting Perceval or Lancelot in a forest where all roads lead to adventure and no road is ever the same twice, have this is common, that there's no rest, no chance to stand still.
Nostalgia is the key, not achievement; the medieval miracle books are full of the stories of pilgrims who died before they ever reached Santiago, yet for their faith alone they were saved. Like the story of Jaufré Rudel of Blaye, who fell in love with Melissande of Tripoli, who voyaged to her in the Holy Land, who died in her arms; an amor de lonh which is not only love from a distance, but love of a distance.
Even the medieval church, the immensely long romanesque cathedrals of England, the drawn-out naves of Ely or Winchester; or the processional churches of France with their massed ambulatories and transept aisles, the round-tour from one door to the other - these churches are themselves a sort of statement in architecture of the theme of the pilgrimage,. From the dark of the narthex under the towers suddenly the pilgrim achieves the light of the basilica, the squashed heavy arches of the narthex or the under-church stairs of Le Puy emerge into a vision of heavenly openness and light.
You are regaining your innocence. The medieval pilgrim was in search of an indulgence, forgiveness for all his sins; and in the same way, as a modern pilgrim, you are expected to do nothing except walk, or crawl, your way towards Santiago. The experience is enough; there are no other entry qualifications, no pass or fail, no distinctions. The path itself is the single point of the pilgrimage.
So half a million pilgrims a year followed this path in the great days of Santiago, the romanesque centuries. So they followed, not just the one path as it is waymarked today, but hundreds of tiny tracks and small lanes and stony droves, all tending the same way like a great funnel of the faith towards the Apostolic and Metropolitan church of St James. Even today you seem to feel other feet went before you on these tracks, when you turn a corner and see a wayside shrine or a carfax chapel, or pilgrim graffiti on a wall, or a now deserted refuge.
The pilgrim path is a strange archaeology of desire and nostalgia. Its layers of history run deep. It was a prehistoric track before Christ ever called James to his service; it was a Roman road, still runs on Roman foundations for part of its length. It was the crusading path in the early centuries of the Santiago cult - the tenth and eleventh centuries when Moors still ruled in Spain, when Moorish incursion as far as Poitiers was still a living memory. In the days of the Reconquista it was a rough military path, the path that Charlemagne took three times, the path that saw the butchery of Charlemagne's rear guard in the wilderness above Roncesvaux. Santiago was the saint of Reconquest, as holy a duty as (later) the Crusade to the Holy Land.
Then slightly later, the path became a cultural corridor, spreading French ideals and French building throughout northern Spain, and heralding as it did so the death of the Visigothic church and Mozarabic rite of Toledo. The newly refounded abbey of Cluny began to dominate, bringing with it the pure traditions of Rome and the impetus towards the centre; bringing Spain for the first time since the Romans into Europe. Even the Toledan handwriting was replaced by French characters; the very way the language was expressed had to change.
The great saints of the pilgrimage route were pressed into service to make the way safe. They were the roadbuilders, the bridgebuilders, the menders of causeways, the keepers of hospitals. They were the pilgrims who never went home. Pilgrimage is an end to the life lived before; and in some ways there is never a returning.
In Chaucer's time the Wife of Bath was still journeying to Saint James; but by then a softer air seemed to breathe over Europe, with the adoration of the Ewigweibliche in the person of the Virgin; and she had begun to steal miracles from St James. Pilgrims not healed at Santiago began to find their miracles at Villalcazar de Sirga, with its white Virgin; Virgins sprung up along the path, taking honour from St James, taking trade from the shrines of the Apostle. Spirituality along the path was still corporate, but instead of the chivalric orders of the Reconquest or the monastic brotherhood of Cluny, the Confréries, confraternities and guilds, sponsored their members on their way to Santiago.
The medieval pilgrimage was a corporate experience, and to some extent it still is, staying in crowded hostels and refuges, never a day (at least in Spain) without meeting another pilgrim, without stamping the pilgrim's carneta at some priest's house or museum. There were even pilgrims by proxy; towns imperilled by plague would send two or three pilgrims to intercede for them, just as the rich would pay priests to say masses for them. The benefits of a pilgrimage were freely transferable; some pilgrims came as the result of a vow made by a wife or parent, and in England the pilgrimage to Compostela was often a condition of inheritance. Pilgrims were even an instrument of winning grace for those who stayed at home; to give to a pilgrim was to give to Christ, to encourage pilgrimage was to encourage religion. The medieval pilgrimage can't be understood as only the sum of individual religious experiences; it was more than that; it was a creature in itself.
Only where the path crosses the Bierzo is there a memory of the individualistic, anchorite tradition of the Thebaid, the hermits who made their homes in the green wilderness between Villafranca and Sarria or in the slaty clouded heights of Foncebadon.
Santiago was not only for the living. The camino de Santiago was the name of the milky way - as, in England, it was called Walsingham Way - and each star in the scattered sky was a soul on its way after death to seek pardon from Saint James. The romances of the way make it into a Lyke Wake way - the journey into death of the soul, crossing the bridge of dread, crossing the whinny moor; and in Spain, the soul crosses running rivers on a beam of candlelight, and comes at last to the basilica blazing in light, the end of life's pilgrimage.
The Reformation destroyed the pilgrimage; and not simply because of the schism, the simple subdivision of Europe into Protestant north and Catholic south. The Counter-Reformation was equally responsible. Religion became private, became personal, a matter of personal meditation and faith; not a matter for public solidarity. Devotional poetry of the middle ages was an open celebration of the faith; but Donne's, Herbert's, John of the Cross's or Sor Juana's poetry is denser, more exploratory, the dramatic working out of individual crises of faith. The ready assumptions on which the pilgrimage was based were no longer true. Religion was individual again like the religion of the early hermits; there was no need to go anywhere, for the centre of religion was in the centre of the self.
By the end of the seventeenth century the pilgrimage was all but dead.
And now pilgrims come to Santiago again. They follow the same paths. They suffer the same Castilian weather; bright cold nights, freezing winters, searing summers. The dangers that the medieval pilgrim ran have gone; there are no wolves to eat them, no bandits, innkeepers though venal are unlikely to murder them. The path never runs far from the road and civilisation is a hitch-hike away. They trudge on foot like the medieval pilgrim; but they have not - or few of them - sold their houses and possessions, or given their money away, nor do they live off scraps begged at inns, or sleep in the straw of a barn at night with only a cloak for cover. Still, in its essentials the way is the same; the voluntary poverty, the voluntary pain.
Yet we are creatures of a different age. We come as individuals, not members of a trusting community. We come for personal reasons, for personal faith. We are not medieval pilgrims, we have found something new. something different; different, I suspect, for each one of us.
Under the layers of history and tradition, what I found was strange; a sense of cleansing, the finding of simplicity.