Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France: The legends of the routes

Today's pilgrims are seeking the marvellous, the surprising, the unexplained, the enchanted. They travel with all their senses, on a physical journey that is also an inner journey. They talk about Encounters. Do they learn to look in order to see?

Contemporary routes evoke pilgrimage without recreating it. The routes have evolved to become modern roads. What remain are the symbols to be deciphered in the buildings and the eternal questions of mankind.

Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise after giving in to the temptation of the forbidden fruit. They and their descendants became strangers passing through the world. This founding myth depicts the human in search of Paradise and salvation.

A pilgrimage is an encounter with the extraordinary, with a world of enchantment and strangeness. The intervention and benevolent actions of saints, angels and demons are what inspired artists and people in their daily lives.

Relics are a bridge between this world and the beyond. Believers can converse with the saints. Through their proximity, they have a medical or veterinary function in an age of basic medicine. Pilgrimage is a therapeutic practice for the body and mind.

A profusion of images fill the churches with tales of wonders, healing and incredible events. The miraculous and the unbelievable became part of the worldview. The votive offerings at Rocamadour are the thanks of sailors saved from peril at sea by the Virgin Mary.

Christianity replaced the polytheistic cults of the waters and the earth... Places were Christianised: a cross placed near the Gréalou dolmen (around 2000 BC) bears witness to this memorial continuity. There is a persisting belief that it has the power to ward off ghosts.

Every society needs an ideal embodied by an imitable hero. The hero is a fortress against evil. The saint was a protector, a liberator, a veterinarian or a healer. Nowadays, they are athletes, artists... pilgrims?

The route is a bridge: a metaphor for human life. It symbolises a transition between two ages, a passage from life to death, from contingency to immortality. It is a shortcut, a bridge over a void. It is a link between two cultures or between people.

Considered a feat of engineering, this bridge defies the Devil. Satan built it in exchange for the soul of the first person to cross it. Guilhem made a dog cross it and, in anger, Satan threw himself into the river. The Devil's Bridge links the abbeys of Aniane and Gellone.  

Travel sparked exchanges with the Orient. The Hôpital-Saint-Blaise's star-shaped dome draws inspiration from Hispano-Moorish architecture. The East was also an important source of relics, with Cadouin Abbey in the Dordogne hosting a pilgrimage to the Holy Shroud.

The Milky Way is another name for the Routes of Santiago de Compostela. In a dream, Saint James appeared to Charlemagne and asked him to free his tomb by following the wake of this celestial nebula, symbol of the path to the salvation of souls.  

The legacy of Charlemagne and his companions is present along the roads. Stories and legends connect them to the Alyscamps cemetery in Arles, the Gellone abbey in Saint-Guilhem, the Saint-Seurin basilica in Bordeaux, and to Blaye and Belin-Beliet.

The scallop shell has been associated with Saint James since the 12th century. This souvenir has become a symbol of recognition worn by all pilgrims. It is also a symbol of fertility, an attribute of the goddess of love, Venus, a funerary offering, and a symbol of resurrection.