By Donald Schell
Mundaka, Spain, Midsummer Eve 2009
On vacation last month, I attended a witch burning. She wasn’t real, of course—it was the local village festival. It started in the plaza. People milled around, talking and gossiping with neighbors, greeting new arrivals, but mostly waiting.
By ten, as the long dusk finally yielded to darkness, we heard shrill fifes and snare drums. Musicians strode into the square each one deftly playing a fife with one hand and drumming their snare drum with the other.
The crowd listened impatiently, and cheered when the witch flew out an alley and into the crowded square.
Her bearers were four very athletic young Basques; it was their skip-dancing that catapulted her into the square, flying on the broom to which she was shackled. The dancers carried her on a bier-like platform on their shoulders, a comical, but credible and somewhat eerie, life-sized bit of straw and black taffeta sculpture. Was she flying around the crowd or were we seeing a memory of how someone would be carried to the execution? I put the question aside.
The crowd offered our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ at the witch’s long white hair and flowing black dress rippling in the breeze and the tiny white Christmas lights eyes that flashed on and off in her plastic witch mask face. Riding on her back, the black cat’s red Christmas light eyes seemed to flash their own effigy of anger at the helpless, dizzying ride the bearers gave witch and cat as vigorous prancing steps rocked the effigies crazily from side to side, backwards and forwards.
The leader of the bearers shouted something in Basque and they skip-danced headlong into the crowd, driving us laughing and screaming in all directions.
Now musicians led us all out of the square and into Mundaka’s narrow twisting streets. It was a full hour before the bearers had to pause, panting for breath. With just one fife giving them a little, lighter music, they marked time slowly in place while the score of little witches who had been following (six to ten-year-old village girls dressed all in black) danced a circle around the bearers and bier and then turned back to dance under it, cutting a giddy figure eight around the brawny bearers and their burden. Then down more twisting streets, past the harbor and up the hill. Finally, they danced the witch into Atalaya Park where the huge pyre of discarded wooden furniture, bedsprings, and even a surfboard stood on the lawn beside St. John’s Church. They pyre made me wonder, was this ritual like spring cleaning or redecorating? Like new years’ resolutions?
The musicians took their place to one side, and the villagers danced—some expert in the traditional Basque dances, other just beginners—all were welcome. Everything felt deliberately, teasingly prolonged, but finally the four carriers climbed the pyre and placed the witch on the very top. She was the stillest she’d been since she appeared. For a moment I wondered how exhausted and nauseated a human prisoner would have been from that two-hour tortuous dance. Was I being too serious? I didn’t pursue the thought, but the image and memory stayed with me.
The music had stopped. The young men who had carried the witch lit the pyre with torches. The witch’s electric eyes flashed in near silence. The crowd was quiet. There was no sound but the sea breeze that lifted the edge of the witch’s dress to show her straw stuffing and faint crackling of fire. Small fires joined together and the flames grew taller.
I’ve found it hard to write about this and capture my confusion. I will confess, somewhat reluctantly that the event was quite wonderful, haunting, and yes, beautiful. We stood, enjoying being part of a tiny human gathering of dancing and firelight in the vastly larger stillness of midsummer night on Spain’s rugged coast.
But it troubled me too. We were celebrating and re-enacting a terrifying, violent death. My first pass at the frightening part was whispering to my wife, Ellen, “I wonder if anyone here knows the old stories about the last time this really happened. How did it become a party?”
But I was speaking a question that made no sense on a magical evening.
Close to 1 a.m. as the fire burned itself down, the musicians finally stopped and the little witches and traditional dancers danced the last steps in their circle dances and bowed to one another, laughed, and scattered.
As we walked back to our hotel, I said to my wife, “Imagine what protests a playful re-enactment like this would produce in Salem, Massachusetts – or Berkeley!”
Remembering the evening as I write, the delight and wonder remain. This was emphatically NOT a human sacrifice, though it imaged one. Somehow remembering and retelling violence won’t sit still to be told straight. Is that a grace or our dilemma? Off and on as we watched I’d wonder whether an outcast woman had ever been burned as a witch in Mundaka, here in this specific site. And watching the exuberant event I heard a faint echo of political rhetoric of wartime ‘sacrifices.’ We have a hard time being honest about death and particularly so when the death we’re remembering is someone dying at others’ hands.
But something else in this play, this turning from violence, the logic of fire on the shortest night of the year felt, I have to say this – holy. I remembered friends’ description of the annual Burning Man encampment in the Nevada desert that ends with the ritual burning of the old man and that year’s temple. Ecstatic play, stillness, fire and the night come together in something haunting and beautiful.
Now remembering my first-time experience of this old piece of folk liturgy, I’m drawn back to the contradictions and my unease at not knowing where I stood. What I was consenting to? And did asking that question cut me off from the atonement, the healing and reconciliation and renewal people were finding in the play of it?
Even not quite getting it, I saw that this village-wide party was turning long-ago real-life horror into something freeing. The witch burning was a kind of liturgy. Had it reconciled or united us by letting us embody something dark in ourselves and celebrate letting go of it?
A couple of villagers had explained their sense of it the afternoon before, ‘The witch is really the dark side of all of us, so on Midsummer Night we let her out to see her and laugh at her, and then we consign her to the light.’ Hum. I sort of got that. Maybe.
But I was also feeling how post-Christian Spain has become. Most of the village would probably claim Catholicism, but only a fraction of the village had been at the very satisfying Catholic mass we’d attended. Spaniards’ Catholicism gets acted out in their huge Holy Week processions (with a few people going to mass afterwards) and in Fiesta events like the witch burning.
What did such Catholics think about Jesus’ death?
That question brings me closer to my unease. What sense does our talking of Jesus’ death, our re-enacting it in Holy Week, and our gratefully recalling it each Eucharist make to an inquiring stranger? How like this lovely but uncomfortable evening is going to our liturgy for the first time?
How does ‘showing forth his death’ make us free? I get it in my gut, and I can talk about it easily with someone formed in our church culture, but are we making sense to people who come to church hungry for God and community?
Do any of us really know how to tell Jesus’ death so that strangers hear Good News? Struggling with these questions for two thousand years the church has proposed many, many answers.
Europe today is very secular. In Europe, the witch (and maybe Jesus) live as part of folklore, custom and fairytale. The human pleasures and even the sense of awe that emerge in their rituals touch no story but our present moment – a house cleaning and a symbolic letting go of dark aspects of ourselves.
Sometimes I hear us ‘proclaiming’ his death in so formulaic and orderly a way that I wonder whether we’re making an effigy. Do we make any connection at all between Calvary and Abu Graib? Does our telling of Jesus’ death touch our own and others’ hearts? And is Jesus’ real teaching and courageous living still in it?
I’ve known moments of heartbreak meditating on Jesus’ suffering. I’ve known gratitude for knowing him and feeling his presence and teaching living in me or in another who loves him, and I’ve felt that living presence in some who don’t know to name him. But I haven’t got a neat ending for this. I’m still wondering.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.