And the Christ Child are."
With their saints these Spanish peasants seem almost on a household footing, not afraid of a jest because so sure of the love that underlies it.
"St. John and Mary Magdalen
Played hide and seek, the pair,
Till St. John threw a shoe at her,
Because she didn't play fair."
Yet there is no lack of fear in this rustic religion. There is many a "shalt not" in the Galician decalogue. One must not try to count the stars, lest he come to have as many wrinkles as the number of stars he has counted. Never rock an empty cradle, for the next baby who sleeps in it will die. So often as you name the Devil in life, so often will he appear to you in the hour of death. If you hear another name him, call quickly, before the Devil has time to arrive, "Jesus is here." It is ill to dance alone, casting your shadow on the wall, because that is dancing with the Devil. But the Prince of Darkness is not the only supernatural being whom Galicians dread. There is a bleating demon who makes fun of them, cloudy giants who stir up thunderstorms, and are afraid only of St. Barbara, witches who cast the evil eye, but most of all the "souls in pain." For oftentimes the dead come back to earth for their purgatorial penance. You must never slam a door, nor close a window roughly, nor kick the smallest pebble from your path, because in door or stone or window may be a suffering soul. To see one is to die within the year. If you would not be haunted by your dead, kiss the shoes which the body wears to the burial.
It is well to go early to bed, for at midnight all manner of evil beings prowl up and down the streets. Who has not heard of that unlucky woman, who, after spinning late and long, stepped to the window for a breath of air exactly at twelve o'clock? Far off across the open country she saw a strange procession of shining candles drawing nearer and nearer, although there were no hands to hold them and no sound of holy song. Straight toward her house came those uncanny lights, moving silently through the meadow mists, and halted beneath her window. Then the foremost one of all begged her to take it in and keep it carefully until the midnight following. Scarcely knowing what she did, she closed her fingers on the cold wax and, blowing out the flame, laid away the taper in a trunk, but when, at daybreak, after a sleepless night, she raised the lid, before her lay a corpse. Aghast, she fled to the priest, who lent her all the relics of the sacristy; but their united power only just availed to save her from the fury of the spirits when they returned at midnight to claim the taper, expecting, moreover, to seize upon the woman and "turn her to fire and ashes."
Sometimes a poor soul is permitted to condense the slow ages of Purgatory into one hour of uttermost torment. Galicians tell how a young priest brought his serving-maid to sorrow and how, to escape the latter burning, she shut herself, one day when the priest was engaged in the ceremonial of High Mass, into the red-hot oven. On his return, he called her name and sought her high and low, and when, at last, he opened the oven door, out flew a white dove that soared, a purified and pardoned soul, into the blue of heaven. The science of this simple folk is not divorced from poetry and religion. The rainbow drinks, they say, in the sea and in the rivers. The Milky Way, the Road to Santiago, is trodden every night by pale, dim multitudes who failed to make that blessed pilgrimage, from which no one of us will be excused, in time of life. When the dust stirs in an empty house, good St. Ana is sweeping there. When babies look upward and laugh, they see the cherubs at play. Tuesday is the unlucky day in Spain, whereas children born on Friday receive the gift of second-sight, and those who enter the world on Good Friday are marked by a cross in the roof of the mouth and have the holy touch that cures diseases. It is a fortunate house beneath whose eaves the swallow builds,
"For swallows on Mount Calvary