The Hidden Camino

By Louise Sommer

In the second edition of her best-selling travel memoir, The Hidden Camino, Louise Sommer takes us back to the famous Camino Francés where she uncovered the truth behind the Catholic Church and its suppression of women. It is a story so compelling you will never look at the Camino the same way again.

"There are many legends swirling around the extraordinary Camino Francés, but one of the earliest and most profound is the Irish legend of Tir-na-Nog. According to this pre-Christian lore, you must be ‘invited’ to walk the Way. In January of 2010, my invitation came..."
Join Louise as she sets off from a small mountain village in France on a voyage of discovery and insights. Follow in the author's footsteps and experience a world of wonders and revelations as hidden truths step out from behind the shadows. This book will make you question everything you think and believe about history and the Camino.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Louise Sommer
• Release date: Jun 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994217028

Louise Sommer

For more than two decades Louise Sommer’s passion has been investigating the role of women in European history. In an effort to understand where our modern-day thought patterns originate regarding gender (men, women, masculinity and femininity), she has educated herself through all manner of reference materials – from research papers, books and articles, as well as her extensive travels.Through her research Louise realised the role Christianity has played in forming our current Western gender roles. These studies led her to look even further back, examining pre-historical cultures in Europe (the goddess cultures from 12.000 BC through until Christianity), as well as immersing herself in studies of indigenous cultures.Louise (b.1972) holds a Masters degree in Educational Psychology and a BA degree in Social Education and is specialised in complicated grief and crisis.Considering herself a global gypsy, Louise loves travelling and has experienced many of the beautiful cultures on the planet. As well as having lived in Denmark, she has resided in the USA and Thailand, and now calls Australia home.

Book preview

Author’s note

Except for the names of Richard, Susie and Ida, all other names, and most nationalities, have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of those mentioned. Some incidents have been altered to maintain the flow of the story, but in no way do these changes affect or change its authenticity or truth.

It is important to note: The Roman Catholic Church laid the foundations of Christianity as we know it. Numerous branches of Christianity throughout history have broken away from the Roman Catholic Church, and many hold wildly differing views. I am very much aware of this. So when I use the terms Christianity and pre-Christianity, I am only referring to the Roman Catholic Church.

Introduction

The Camino is said to follow beneath the Milky Way, and that the stars will guide the pilgrim along the pathway. The term ‘Milky Way’ comes from the Vikings who believed the Milky Way was a river of milk, from which the gods drank and received their divine powers.

Could it be that this River of Milk, that guides the pilgrim, is the Light of Divinity? And could it be that the human who walks this way becomes nourished and enlightened, too, just like the gods?

The Camino is a pilgrimage in the north of Spain, and it means The Way. Many people also call it The Way of Saint James, but only a few know that the Camino existed long before Christianity.

Back then the end destination was Finisterra, coming from the latin words Finis Terrae. The correct translation is the ‘End of the Earth’, not the ‘End of the World’, as some say. This is particularly important, because the End of the Earth is connected to the Celtic legend of Tir-na-Nóg; the physical world as we know it, the End of the Earth is where the divine world of Tir-na-Nóg begins. The Way, had also been a sacred path for the Celts.

For the Celts, Finisterra was considered the place where heaven and earth, spirit and matter met. It was here the druidesses and druids performed their most sacred rituals and initiations. It was indeed a sacred place. Tir-na-Nóg is the Land of Eternal Youth, a paradise located west of the known world. It is inhabited by enchanting female creatures whose beauty surpasses all. Here, only music, strength, life energy and pleasure exist.

There are only two ways to reach Tir-na-Nóg: you must have received either an invitation or you must have walked the hard and difficult way, looking deep into your own soul. You see, just as Oisin, when he travelled with the nymph Niamph on her magical horse, so must every human have a guide to Tir-na-Nóg. Only they know the way to the Land of Eternal Youth. Only they have horses with golden manes who can fly you across the big ocean to the island in the west.

At Finisterra, one can find the burial tomb of the Celtic goddess, Orcabella. She was the old crone goddess, the hag who, in the Middle Ages, was made into the evil witch we all know from fairytales. But in pre-Christian times, the crone goddess was the seer and the teacher. She was the one who knew about the forces that drove life. She was death and she was wisdom. She, just like Finisterra, was the sacred place where a human, after having walked the long hard road, entered the last stage of transformation before the rebirth.

The tradition says that, at sunset, you must stand and look out over the ocean at Finisterra. Here, the sun sets over to the west, the direction of Tir-na-Nóg. The night is your initiation. As the sun rise above the well known world, the earth, your transformation is complete. Collect the first shell you find on the beach. This is your gift, your proof of having walked the Way of Orcabella, the Way for Enlightenment.

For the Celts, the new day always began at sunset, that very time when the sun is at its most golden and glowing. And the sun was, indeed, worshipped at Finisterra for more than 4000 centuries, as was the goddess.

For those with eyes to see…

The Start Of My Journey

It was January, 2010, when something changed in my life that would lead me to walk the Camino. To that point, there was nothing out of the ordinary happening. I was busy at work and studying for my Masters degree. It wasn’t an especially happy or unhappy time; my life just seemed to be muddling along.

But then these goddesses from around the world walked into my dreams and turned everything upside down. In the beginning, I understood them to be archetypes of the Great Goddess. But then, who was the Great Goddess? It was a concept that was hard for me to understand. So I was short of terminology, and I was a little confused on how to label these visitors to my dreams. In fact, these dreams were confusing. Full stop.

The first time I brought the dreams up with my therapist, I found the process extremely difficult. What would my therapist think? Was my ego about to freak out or was I about to have a meltdown? I hardly knew what to do. I mean, what had I done to deserve such divine and love-filled dreams?

I have to admit that the whole situation was out of my comfort zone – especially during the first few months. Then it became more frustrating because the energies I experienced in my dreams were so powerful. It felt as if the planets had suddenly rotated in some odd way and a golden gate had opened just like that, without any further introduction.

Over a period of nearly two years, my dreams taught me to see and they taught me to hear. And before long, I found myself in a place where earth and sky met.

This book is the account of my journey on the Camino and my meeting with its hidden story; a journey that was so much larger than me. Where I thought I would end up in the east, I would end up in the west, and I never knew my next step before I had taken it. But the journey began a long time before I even thought about the Camino.

The Dreams

The very first dream that came to me was about the Church of Mary Magdalene.

It is late evening and I come walking towards a big wooden gate next to a moat. I pass through the gate and continue walking towards a mighty church made from red bricks.

As I enter the church I can see that there is no ceiling, only the night sky above me where the stars sparkle in the distance. The floor appears to be made of stone pathways, from which enormous white pillars rise and disappear out into the sky. There is no floor between the pathways, so the church floats on a invisible base of dark blue.

The white pillars are decorated with beautiful animals, whales, dolphins, symbols of torches with large flames, stars, scallop shells, Egyptian symbols and many others. I recognise the symbols from across many cultures and ages, and know they were used to describe the connection with our innate spirituality.

This place is indeed sacred. It is filled with a presence of an unbelieveble stillness, mystery and knowledge.

Impressed and humbled, I walk around and look in amazement. Never in my entire life did I think a place of such beauty could exist.

Reaching the eastern side of the church, I walk up onto a plateau where I have a good view over the building. From here, I can see that the pathways are formed in the shape of a eight-pointed star. In the dream, I remember that the number eight, in some traditions, refers to Venus. Someone tells me that this is the very Church of Mary Magdalene.

As I walk towards what I think is the altar and centre of the church, I see a heavily pregnant Mary Magdalene, wearing a long green gown. She is walking along the stone pathways, crying. She looks devastated and walks around restlessly. Her unhappiness fills my heart, so I ask her why she is so unhappy. She tells me it is because she has lost her husband. She has been searching for him for almost two thousand years without success.

Her long search has etched her footprints into the stones of the pathways.

I had tears in my eyes when I woke the next morning. My heart was still broken as I felt her grief in telling me her sad story. But I also felt deeply touched by the extremely moving design of the church and the fact that it was actually her church. The dream had been so alive that it felt like I had actually been there.

I knew it was normal to be affected by dreams for a short while, but as the day progressed the intensity of this dream continued. It was impossible to shake it off and, as the hours passed, the more emotional I felt. That day, no matter where I went or what I did, Mary Magdalene seemed to appear. It was extremely eerie and a little unreal. But if I thought that this was just a single night’s dream, I was mistaken. This dream was only the first of many that continued for almost the next two years – especially the first year and a half, where they came almost nightly; strong, insisting and incredibly beautiful.

Mary Magdalene was the first of the many goddesses I was to dream about. However, she was quickly accompanied by dreams about the Grail. In the first dream, the Grail was a necklace. After that, the Grail would have different shapes: the map of a country or the sun. But no matter what shape it had, it would always be a shining golden light. Shortly after the Grail, the Norse goddess, Freya, appeared. Just like the Grail, she too, was connected to spring – the Rebirth of Life. Mary Magdalene on the other hand, is closely related to the Summer Solstice as her feast day is July 22. The day of Summer Solstice is June 22.

Like so many other things related to my dreams and the following journey, very little made sense before the end. However, noticing that the times of spring and Summer Solstice were central in my dreams, I felt this would be a process of maturation. The day of Summer Solstice was actually a part of a longer celebration that went over several weeks. In ancient Scandinavian shamanistic traditions, the time of Summer Solstice was when the connection with the Divine invisible worlds and Earth, was the closest and strongest. It was considered a time when humans could access the most powerful energy of manifestation.

It wasn’t that I disliked the dreams; it was more the intensity of them that was so hard to handle. It was as if they were stirring up a pot of emotions I didn’t feel like stirring up at all. I suppose it also made me a little nervous dreaming about Mary Magdalene and the Grail in this way because they were religious figures, and I was not a religious person.

I was, however, quite pleased to dream about Freya as she was a part of my native Nordic mythology. But as I thought about it, so was Mary Magdalene! She was a part of the Christian religion which had shaped the history of my country for centuries. Realising this, I started to feel much more comfortable with it. It did puzzle me, though; why did I dream about her church?

A few days later, I found myself hurrying along one of the main streets in Copenhagen, trying to get to the Metro before rush hour. I became caught up with hundreds of people, all trying to find their way around and through the endless, annoying inner-city construction works. Would they ever end?

In an effort to escape the chaos, I decided to take a detour. But just as I was about to cross a busy square, I suddenly felt very clear in my head and was overcome by an urge to turn left, deeper into the crowds of people. That was odd? I was trying to get away from them, not closer.

Out of curiosity, I decided to follow my instinct to see where it would lead me. Maybe a little surprised, I ended up in a bookshop. Inside, I walked directly up to a book about Mary Magdalene as if someone was showing me the way. It was written by a Dutch scholar named Esther De Boer. I looked at the book by for a moment before picking it up and letting the pages run through my fingers, wondering why.

On the first page where I stopped to read, the text read that in 1969, the Roman Catholic Church had officially altered its long term position in describing Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. What!? I had never heard about this, and due to my recent dreams about Mary Magdalene, I couldn’t help but feel there was something significant about this coincidence.

As I walked away from the bookshop, I wondered why I had never come across this information before. I had studied parts of church history for many years and still not seen any reference to this change. Maybe I had been looking in the wrong places. But still, this was a major deal, the references should have been there somewhere. So I went home and began searching for information about the church’s rather secretive admission. And what I found shocked me.

In my research, I discovered that Pope John Paul II in 1988, had written an Apostolic letter titled Mulieris Dignitatem; ’On the dignity and vocation of women’. In this letter, the Pope had referred to Mary Magdalene as Apostola Apostolorum, that is, ’the Apostle to the Apostles.’ Indicating, that Mary Magdalene was a teacher to the other Apostles although it didn’t specifically describe how. The title Apostola Apostolorum was given to Mary Magdalene as she was the first to witness the resurrected Jesus, to receive the instructions from Him and as such, was the bearer of this news to the other Apostles. But who, or what, I wondered, had created Magdalene as a repentant sinner to begin with? After much research, I discovered that it was Pope Gregory the Great who, in 591AD, had declared Mary Magdalene a prostitute. From what I could understand, Pope Gregory the Great had been in the need of a ‘perfect sinner’, and therefore had interpreted the relevant sections of Luke’s gospel to suit his own ends. But he also made two other ‘changes’ that would support his claim of Magdalene as a prostitute; he (deliberately?) confused the different Marys mentioned in the gospel and he decided that the ‘seven deadly sins’ meant being possessed by evil. This was an interpretation that was built on a manipulated lie created to make Magdalene ‘the perfect sinner’. But never the less, my research proved that Mary Magdalene had never been a prostitute to begin with! So the questions were; who had Mary Magdalene been before her narrative had been changed into a sinful woman? And why was the Roman Catholic church, even to this day, still preaching (almost thirty years after Pope John Paul’s II Apostolic letter) that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute and of no importance? The shocking answers to these questions wouldn’t become clear to me before the end of the Camino.

I felt sick to my stomach when learning of this. How could something so important go so unnoticed? But the fact that it had, made me realise more that ever, that Mary Magdalene mirrored what the church had done towards women – done towards me. Mary Magdalene had become an archetype of the supressed and depowered woman, but there was a time when she had been so much more. Sorry, I am getting ahead of my story here. Let me just say that there was indeed a very good reason as to why she was the first goddess to appear in my dreams and why she was associated with the Summer Solstice.

The Invitation

Shortly after I had dreamt about Freya the first time, I had a dream about another goddess. I didn’t know her name or who she was, and didn’t find out before a friend showed me a picture of an ancient Brazilian goddess. The picture she showed me sent chills up and down my spine. The woman, and the scene in the picture, was exactly the same as I had experienced in my dream. What really made a difference in seeing this, was the fact that someone else had ‘met’ her, too. She wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Her name was Lemanja, and my therapist later told me she was considered the goddess of the ocean and the stars.

I stand on a beach and see a clear blue sky filled with small shining stars. The ocean rolls onto the shore with lazy calm waves and I am all alone. When I turn my head to the left I see an indescribably beautiful woman come walking towards me along the water’s edge. Her long dark hair tumbles over her shoulders and down her back and dances in the breeze like the light blue robe she is wearing. It is as if something around her shines like a full moon. I wonder how someone like her can be so real.

Her deep brown eyes look into mine, and I feel embraced by her unconditional love and kindness. She smiles gently, but says nothing. I keep staring at her, mesmerised. How can anybody love me this much? How can anybody see so much beauty in me? I don’t understand it, but her love is so strong that it overcomes my negative emotions. As she comes close to me, she reaches out her hand and says, ‘Come’.

I had been given an invitation. When I awoke the following morning, I was suffused with all the love I had experienced. Her presence wavered back and forth within my body. In the reflection of her love for me, I realised how little I actually loved myself, my body and my femininity. It stood unquestionably clear to me, that I had become my own worst friend. But not only that, I had also let the world around me convince me that this was true.

The incredible thing was, that the strength of Lemanja’s love was so powerful that it won over the negative feelings I had about myself. It was just so hard to understand that in me, something so beautiful, so wise and divine, could exist. It was as if all these women rebelled against my lack of self-esteem and insisted on showing me a different reality. It was time to free myself from these illusions, to open my eyes and actually see.

To my relief, my therapist told me, that my dreams were normal archetypical dreams. There was nothing partcularly unusual about that. I thought: ‘Okay, I know about Jungian psychology; I can deal with that.’ But once back home, I began studying his theory about archetypes more closely – a study that soon led me even deeper into my interest of alchemy.

I left my session that day thinking I had seen the last of these dreams. Everything could go back to normal. But no, they continued at full speed. My dreams about Mary Magdalene, the Grail, Freya and Lemanja remained, especially those involving Mary Magdalene and her church. But other goddessees also joined in. And as with Lemanja, women with identities I hadn’t known of previously, entered my dreams.

I found this rather interesting as there wasn’t any obvious or logical connection between them and myself. How could they appear in my dreams when I had never heard of them before? And so, ever so slowly, I started to understand that they were not only archetypes for something in me; they were also universal archetypes connected to what Jung called, the ‘collective conscious’. I called it ‘that greater something’ because my experiences made me feel that I was a part of something much bigger. Over the years, I learnt that my dreams contained many levels of information at the same time, embracing me in a vast context of history, culture, society and spirituality.

The intensity of the dreams started to create a snowball effect of thoughts, which placed women, and particularly women in history, in the centre. And one day, whilst moving from one meeting to another, thinking about some of my recent dreams and a book I was reading, I found myself wondering why I had heard only about so few women in history. Taking into consideration that half the world’s population were women, they obviously must have been there. So why were they only mentioned as a sideline or in a negative context, if at all? And so, my study in Christianity changed to focus on women. I even expanded my search field and started to look deeper into the pre-Christian times of ancient Europe. (These times are often described as times of ’matriarchal cultures’, which is somewhat incorrect. I like to refer to them as times of the ’goddess cultures’ as that is my main focus in this book.)

It was a new and exciting road that made so many things clear to me, but it also created many more questions. One of them was related to the origin of the Virgin Mary. To be honest, I didn’t even know that she had ‘an origin’. She was Jesus’ mother; that was it! But I was to learn, that when it came to women in history and religion, very little was as it seemed.

As time went by, my therapist started to question why I kept having these dreams, so intense and over such a long period of time. What she didn’t tell me, until after the Camino, was that archetypical dreams as strong as mine indicated that a huge change would occur in my life. Not just a nice little change, but a change that moved mountains, and only the future knew how these changes would be manifested.

For almost 2000 years, we in Europe have learnt not to see Her and not to hear Her. Maybe this was one of the reasons I was so lost when my dreams began. For what do we do when we no longer can ignore Her and that part of ourselves anymore? With spirituality locked up in either (patriarchial) religions or an airy-fairy New Age movement, it is difficult to know where to turn. We can end up with depression and a narcissistic ego thinking we are something ‘chosen’ or we live in fear of our ‘different’ self. Where do we as women turn when the history and culture we grow up in constantly portray us as invisible or wrong, banishing our spirituality into legends such as the Mists of Avalon and fairytales like Cinderella?

Due to the awakening and subsequent questioning resulting from the dreams I became increasingly frustrated and restless. Although I did find my studies interesting and inspiring, I also felt an inner pressure building up. I started to feel that I needed to do something, change something. But what? How?

It took me a long time before I was able to admit why I had such difficulty listening to my dreams. Where I had felt good about the intellectual approach to them, it was much harder to embrace the emotions the dreams awakened as they triggered a confusion and pain I felt about my own womanhood. So what did I do? I fought like a Viking. I fought the healing from the dreams so hard when all I should have done was to surrender. But I wouldn’t. And so, frustrations, restlessness and irritation built up along with self-doubt.

It was about this time, that I dreamt about a woman I called my grandmother. She wasn’t my maternal grandmother, but we had met in my early twenties and had immediately developed a deep connection. As time passed, I had become her and her husband’s ‘adopted’ granddaughter.

My grandmother sits on a sofa together with her beloved husband. She looks at me with her ever so warm and caring eyes.

‘My dearest grandchild,’ she says, ‘it’s all about the dance of life …You must learn to listen to the music in your heart and you must learn to follow the path that is yours. First you learn each single step, then you learn the wholeness, and then you learn the flow of movement within the body; the dance itself.’

I felt very reassured and much more at peace when I woke up. Here was a figure that I knew. My grandmother had been a very special person to me, and had taught me innumerable valuable lessons about life. Later the same day, I climbed the stairs to my attic and found all the papers, books and folders my grandmother had left me before her death. Looking though some of the papers, I noticed a lot of the material was about the Grail. I couldn’t help smiling. I had never paid any attention to it before. But I suppose that’s the way it is. We see when we are ready.

In some of my grandmother’s notes, I saw references that went far back into history. Like many others, I had thought the Grail was a Christian legend. However, according to my grandmother, the Grail had a much older history. Apparently, the Grail could be traced back to the cult of the Norse goddess Inanna as well as the religions of ancient Egypt and of the Middle East. To my surprise, I also discovered that the Grail, in the shape of a chalice, had appeared first in the Middle Ages. Before then, the Grail had been a stone (for example, the Philosophers Stone, the stone in the legend of King Arthur), a magic cauldron, an urn and the Horn of Abundance. Today, many consider the actual Grail to be the children of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. However my grandmother’s notes also mentioned that the Grail had strong links to the Celtic goddess Eriu, who in ancient Ireland had been the Grail maiden personifying Mother Nature and her Power of Creation. The ritual of Eriu was celebrated in the spring.

Feeling overwhelmed about all this new information, I recovered a book my grandmother and her husband had given me. It was about the Grail, too. Why had I never thought about this before, I wondered. I flicked through some pages before deciding to read it. I thought back on all the talks my grandmother and I had together over the years and I always looked forward to the next visit. I could talk about everything with my grandmother. With her I shared all my dreams, my deepest thoughts and my life experiences without ever fearing judgement or misunderstanding; I knew that she would always understand.

It took a long time to heal the hole she left behind. For a whole week following her death I had dreams about her. In these dreams, I saw her dance, spinning around, having so much fun.

‘Look,’ she said and laughed, ‘Look! I’m feeling good. I can dance. Be happy for me.’

But it was hard to be happy for her as my loss was too great. I knew she had suffered enormously with back pain for more than three decades, and it was something that had limited her daily physical activities to a routine of regularly changing between standing, sitting and lying down. And yet, she would always be filled with an inner peace, an inner knowing, always driven towards helping other people through life. I often wondered how anyone could become such a good human being.

Some time after her death, her husband found a note in her diary, where she had predicted her time of passing. But that’s the way it was with my grandmother. All of her life she had experienced dreams and visions. Today I wondered if her dreams and visions had helped her rise above her pain and physical limitations and become the wise and compassionate woman that I loved. For this reason, dreams about my grandmother always meant a lot to me. I knew they appeared to tell me that everything was okay and give me advice on how to deal with whatever situation I was facing.

My grandmother was a