My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

In Spanish the word seises, plural of seis, means “sixes,” and it is usual to conclude that the name was given because six little boys performed the curious old-world movements known as the “dance.” But as a matter of fact ten little boys take part, and one seventeenth-century writer speaks of twelve and another of seven, and although my impression is that these two figures were slips of the copyists, there is no evidence that the number ever was precisely six, as it must have been for that to be the origin of the name. It looks, therefore, as if the assumption that seises here means sixes (and why not Six instead of Sixes as if they were dice?) were one of those hasty philological generalisations based upon sound alone which constantly crop up to puzzle the conscientious historian.

Those who pin their faith to the obvious translation of the word as written to-day, suggest that originally there were only six dancing boys, and that the other four were the attendants of the Archbishop, placed by way of ornament at the four corners of the carpet on which the dance takes place—and a very beautiful old carpet it is, by the way. But here we meet with the objection that, whereas the corner boys are the tallest of the ten, those who attend the Archbishop are the smallest, and moreover that two and not four follow in his train. To us who know how great is the force of tradition in southern Spain, it is inconceivable that the Dean and Chapter, or the Archbishop, or even the Pope himself, should arbitrarily and for no apparent purpose, at a time which is not stated in any record, have added four more to the six boys whose number is supposed to have given the name to their dance. Nor is it probable that this particular dance should have been made numerically more important when all over Christendom the religious dances of the Middle Ages were dying out or were being deliberately suppressed by the Church.

The most rational explanation appears to be that of a friend of mine, a distinguished Orientalist, who propounded a theory that the dance is a survival of the Mozarabic ritual, and that the little “Seises” were originally the sais, or attendants on the priests, at the time when Arabic was the only language used in Seville, not only by the Moslems in their mosques, but by the Arabicised Christians who maintained their own forms of worship although they had forgotten their own tongue. Two little sais are seen in one of the illuminations of the Cántigas of Alfonso the Wise (1252) in attendance upon a priest who is worshipping the image of Our Lady of the See (Sede—now over the high altar in the Cathedral), and they were provided with rations and education by a Bull of Pope Eugene IV. in 1438. But nowhere do we find any mention of their number, as we could hardly fail to do had it been limited to six; whereas nothing would seem more natural than the conversion of the Arabic sais into the Spanish seis, when Castilian was made the language of reconquered Andalucia by law of Alfonso the Wise.

But for the loss of the deeds and archives relating to the faithful Mozarabs of this diocese and their metropolitan Church of Saint Mary during the troubled half-century between 1200 and the reconquest in 1248, we might have known something about the true origin of the Seises, of the mediæval fresco of “Our Lady of the Old Time,” and others of Mozarab tradition, of the celebrated Guilds and Brotherhoods which come out in procession in Holy Week, and of other curious details of Sevillian ritual touched upon in a later chapter.

I will take the festivals enlivened by the Dance of the Seises in their order, beginning with the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin (to give the feast its full official title), for this not only comes first in point of time, its vigil being on 7th December, when winter weather has hardly yet begun in this favoured clime, but it is in point of fact the greatest festival in the whole ecclesiastical year in Seville, which city from first to last was the self-constituted champion of this “Mystery.”

No one seems to know when the belief that Mary as well as her Son was born without human agency first began to gain ground in Seville, but Don Manuel Serrano, who has spent most of his life in the study of Sevillian Church history and art, believes he has evidence that her “sinless birth” was venerated from the fourth century onwards, and that St. Isidore, the “learned doctor” of Seville, found it in the primitive rite and transferred it to his own liturgy not very long before the Moslem invasion. And since the Isidorian or Sevillian ritual (Rito hispalense) was the one used here by the Mozarabs throughout the dominion of Islam until San Fernando replaced it by the Roman rite in 1248, Sevillian archæologists have some ground for claiming that this see was par excellence “the land of the Blessed Virgin” (tierra de Maria Santisima) throughout its chequered history. At any rate, some evidence in favour of their claim is that the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin does not figure in the Mozarab ritual of Toledo before the year 1300, whereas it seems to have been in full swing here in 1248, for Alfonso the Wise in his Chronicle refers to the use in Seville of the ritual of “Saint Isidre é de San Leadre” (SS. Isidore and Leander), which contains this feast.

The belief in the “Mystery” was by no means universally accepted after the reconquest even in Seville, whatever may have been the case among the faithful Mozarabs, but feeling did not wax really hot over it until the seventeenth century. Then the Franciscans and Jesuits combined to work for its acceptance by the whole Church, while the Dominicans controverted it, and Seville took the lead in what became almost a holy war. Extraordinary acts of devotion were witnessed, among the most remarkable being the selling of himself back into slavery by a freed slave, who gave the price of his own flesh and blood to the cult of the “Most Pure.” He and his fellow-negroes maintained an altar to the Conception in the church of Our Lady of the Angels, and it was for this that the freed slave desired to raise money. And a priest in an excess of ecstasy actually had the A.M. (Ave Maria) branded on his face.

The burning of a Dominican monastery was considered an intervention of Providence against those who “insulted” Our Lady by denying her miraculous birth, and it gave rise to serious rioting, only quelled at last by the ecclesiastical authorities placing over the door of the monastery the inscription, “Mary, conceived without sin.” To this period of storm and stress are to be assigned the numerous repetitions of the monogram A.M. (Ave Maria) seen over the doors of old houses in almost every town and village in Andalucia and other provinces where the controversy raged, and from this century dates the addition of an image of the Virgin to almost every one of the Holy Week processions, with its accompanying banner called the Sin Pecado, because embroidered with those words in testimony to Mary’s immaculate conception. And of this period too is a remarkable festival cope in the church of San Lorenzo at Seville, made of white brocade woven all over with the monogram A.M. and the initials S.P.O., so that on every fold it reads “Hail Mary! Born without original sin” (Ave Maria, Sin Pecado Original).

And now the ancient Dance of the Seises became one of the most brilliant features in the festival of the Conception. Hitherto, one gathers, no special pains had been bestowed upon the costumes of the boys, but in 1654 it was thought desirable to bring them “up to date.” One would give a good deal to know how they were dressed before this, for probably the costumes were traditional and centuries old in style if not material. But the wealthy and pious Sevillians had then as now but scant regard for relics of the past. The Chapter which thought it a great deed to remove the robes in which San Fernando was buried in 1252 and replace them with the costume of their own day (in which costume the embalmed corpse of the great general and saintly monarch is still displayed to the gaze of his worshippers three times in every year)—such a Chapter would be incapable of seeing anything worth preservation in the dancing-boys’ dress of, say, the thirteenth century. And they readily found a devout old couple to present a complete new set of “ornaments” for the festival of the Conception in the Cathedral, including costumes for the Seises.