Codex 8

By Vicente Moreno Martin

The key of spirituality it is to know thyself.
Following the steps of the Red Knight trying to discover the Three Doors of James.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359656561

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Codex 8

CODEX 8

Vicente Moreno Martin

With deep gratitude

To my sister Maria Luisa

Copyright © 2019

Vicente Moreno Martin

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced

without the permission, in writing, from the author

ISBN

978-0-359-65656-1

eBook in USA by Lulu.com

INTRODUCTION

HELGA

It was at the beginning of October of the year 1981, when Helga invited me to her home for breakfast. It was nine in the morning when I entered her residence. Helga, in her sixties, dwelt with her mother, already in her nineties, in a small two bedrooms apartment.

The tiny dining room was centered with a round table, already prepared with three services for breakfast: a hard-boiled egg, butter, three kinds of jam and another diversity of breads that, with the aroma of a strong coffee, impregnated the area.

Helga asked me to remove my shoes, telling me the custom of northern Europe when you are among friends.

The living room was protected with different carpets, already antiquated, denoting a social high class, concept that it was accented by the quantity of books casing most of the walls. The Sun’s morning light of autumn, sifted by a delicate curtain, dipped the place with longing.

Helga, once seated, spoke of her family. They were part of the German nobility. With the arrival of Hitler, they were forced to give up their ancestral home. Her father waited for death in there, but he obliged his family to survive this blow. A humble Austrian Catholic priest was the only one helping them in their pledge. Her children, grandchildren and nephews were now scattered mainly throughout North America.

Once her feelings were irradiating from all the corners of the hall, bathed with the golden hiding autumnal light, she revealed me the moral essence of her family.

-My ancestors, since the Middle Ages, assumed the task of implanting Christianity. It was, of familiar property, a manuscript prophesying the future of Christianity, and it told of a Knight: The Red Knight.

When she was eight years old, three months before leaving home, it reached her mansion a traveling old man, he went straight to the library, found the famous book of prophecies and opening it in the image of the Red Knight, he showed it to little Helga, saying:

-Help me find this Red Knight.

Helga, when leaving Germany, ran to the library and removed the image of The Red Knight.

-It was the only thing, I moored with me.

Lengthening her delicate hand, she showed me the icon of a Red Knight.

I cannot detail the many items of the image. Was an adult horseman, without helmet, with long black hair, dressed in red, with a sheathed sword in his waist, mounting a horse, also with red saddlecloth. The image had an inscription at the bottom, in Old German Gothic characters. The Knight was winding towards the front, as to the point of dying. His hair covered his expression with an immense sense of failure.

The background of the image, representing a city all wasted, as if of a desert without water, or of a mirage be existent, highlighted the soul attitude of The Red Knight. The red and the black were the most shocking tints, but mostly it was a light wheat-brown shade pointing the sky, the destroyed buildings and the path of the rider. It was truly like an autumn sunset.

-The prophecy means it after the end, when already all is ruined. The humanity will be self-destroyed; hence, the Knight is totally alone.

The autumnal Sun, the feelings, the minds of the three of us, stop for an instant and a door was open for us towards the spirit. Remounting outside from the sense of time and space, we reached in our hearts a remote place in which any of us have being previously.

When closing that door and returning to the present, I asked for the meaning of the inscription.

-Somebody would come, someday, that will translate it for you.

She gave it to me.

-When Luther did a first step towards a sincerer Christianity, my family thought that he was The Red Knight, and we join his cause. But later, we got to understand that these prophecies are still to come.

Today, halfway through October of 2010, nineteen years after this encounter, I imagine Helga and her mother in the world of the spirit. Will someone of her family, recall these prophecies? Will I find somebody desiring to move to the heart of Jesus, in a more authentic Christianity?

The soccer players of Manchester United are called The Red Knights; the Holy Grail is the European Football Cup. Do I have to accept all these prophesies as adulterated, or it bluffed with? Is it possible that the materiality has soaked our society and each other so much that we cannot preview the spirit?

The day I encounter Manolo, someone stole all I had, including my identity. They took the valuable stamp, and already it will be wasted in some dumpster. There, possibly, along with it, lie all the redemption dreams of a Europe very different from the present one

.

WILHELM

Each day I appreciate more the present time, trying not to preview voluntarily the future. But there are moments in my life, in which invade me gusts of past situations, that for a short second flatten me in a past of which I want to avoid. Sometime the second turns hours, or days, or weeks.

The Portuguese autumn of 1986 was humid and cold. The naked trees on the elaborate axles of stone covering the main plaza of Tomar, incentivized the coldness of the place, the day in which Wilhelm invited me to the Templar fortress. The melancholy of the evening enlarged the loneliness of my soul, inundating those broken cravings and lost aims.

Since my youth, I listened and read about the Order of the Templar Knights, the Cathars and other Christian Gnostic and heretical groups. I kept all this mental information of peoples craving for a Mystical union with Christ. Simultaneously they rooted the bases for the European human development, constructing strongholds and cities. They also counterfeit a financial system, the monetary system, copying what they discovered in the Middle East. These would become the envy of the European kings; that finally it got Philip IV of France, in 1312, to kill all of them in such a cruel way and steal their wealth.

I was born in Algemesi, a little town in Valencia, Spain, founded by Arabs; Al-gemis , means The Thursday. The village had been populated after James I conquest, a Templar, in 1240, by settlers of different places. My ancestors came from a small location in the Pyrenees called Mollo. Mollo means, in the Languedoc, Llenguadoc or Occitan language, dividing stone, used to delimit the property. No one could remove it, since that stone was sited deeply into the ground to trace the limits of the real estate property. When I was born, the neighbors called me with that familiar name, not by my surname.

I am writing it because in 1950, seven hundred years after James I conquest, the people kept in their ancestral memory, their genetic origin.

The Cathars were declared heretics and exterminated in 1209, in Beziers. When they asked the murderer for the disparity, of more than twenty thousand inhabitants, between Cathars and Catholic, he answered with a phrase that made him famous: Kill all of them and may God welcome His own. Aimé, in 1975, still showed me Beziers, pointing the places where fell the victims of the Cathars leaders. A flower and a lit candle, in the street, still remembered, with eternal love, the pilgrimage of the souls.

James I´s father, Peter II the Catholic, died defending heretics. Before passing away, he sent his young child, James, to Monzon, to be educated by the Templars. As being instructed by a Military Order, he gave to his kingdom certain ascetic, spartan character of austerity. The Order of Knights Templar would require daily hours of meditation on the Passion of Jesus, and in the center of their fortresses, they erected the octagonal form, copy of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, in which they placed a Cross. All of it gave a sober tone to his kingdom; opposed to other royal houses for which wasting and moral degradation were indications of authority and power.

He assumed the characteristic of a government of Knights. They were called Knights because they had horses. The horse is a very peculiar creature. Possibly, in those times, only the Mongolian, the peoples of Central Asia, the Hungarians, the Arabs, loved them excessively and they recognized them. Later, the Native Americans join them in their firmness.

The horse, as much closeness as he gets with the rider, acquires a proper noun and core. Each Knight has his, and when riding it, he is forced to open his legs in a painful way; he rides on the horseback sticking together his genitals. With the gallop he excites himself; his feelings join with the horse. How are you going to understand the nature of the Knight, if you don't recognize his other half? Horseman and horse connect sensibly internally; with time, the Knight would not able to walk, nor move, without his horse. He must learn to live, to fight, to rest on him, searching for his fed, refreshing waters and pastures to expand. He will varnish, appreciating him, even loving him, more than to any other creature.

This culture of the horse formulated that the reception chamber of the Templar fortress had in its entrance a stable for the horses and a small esplanade of grass for their expansion.

When forming his Kingdom, James attracted Jewish exegetes, that could translate and explain him the Old Testament. He did build Lonjas, Lounges; they were lay buildings, in which merchants could interchange or commercialize material goods. Out of those Lounges was born the Stock Market. Valencia´s Lonja was the first European building dedicated to mercantilism. All contracts were done by word, nothing was written or signed. Lluis of Santangel, a Valencian Jew, a century later, paid for the Discovery of America. James had a Law of State that it was the following: a Christian could not make direct deals with other Christians, to avoid financial complications, so they required of the Jews, in order that they were the intermediaries between buyer and seller, starting so the work of mediators or dealers. It was a system to promote employment and the well-being of a people, like the Jew, at that time errant, dispersed and without destiny.

It has been written a lot about that tripartite distribution, leaving the Legislative power to the Christians, the Administrative system to the Jews, and the Local Government to the Arabs. Someone, somewhere, unbalanced this perfect scale; so nowadays the Christians try to control the Commerce, the Jews the Legal System and the Arabs the Spiritualism.

Valencia became, in two hundred years, the fourth city in inhabitants of Europe. The arts, among them Literature, flowered in splendor. The Bible was translated to the vernacular language, now denominated Valencian. My father taught me that the only property of the human being is the language. Many Valencians still possess today a deep love for their language. My father could not tolerate a single bad, degrading, or double meaning words; although not written, this was the only norm at home.

We use the word el-the, la-the for the good man or woman, for what it is concrete, tangible; and yet what is truly good, we qualify it as lo-it good, which is beyond any sexual connotation, abstract, intangible, theoretical. We use lo- it to separate what is sublime of what is unexceptional. The heraldic animal of Valencia is the bat: lo rat pennat.

But all this, in today´s world, is of no matter to anyone. For me, to remember it, imposes a heavy load of blues, highlighted with the autumn. I do try to store it again in my ancestral memory, even though I ponder how little it has for me, as I was never interested in the withered histories of my lineage. I always found them opaque, since on the Iberian Peninsula was a Reconquest stripping the Arabs and Jews of all their history. The Crusades, drawn up by the Roman church, tried, at the same time, to eradicate the Jewish and Muslim influence. The inquisition burnt all the Valencian Biblical translations, shedding the people of their word, and imposing the submission to a language without any moral content.

From the viewpoint in which I found myself, all these complicated records of history about persistent treaties, hates, betrayals among themselves and between the Mongolian armies, the Papal services and the Egyptian Sultan, Baibars, it caused an opaque dissatisfaction in my soul.

On perceiving Tomar, though, gusts of the past reached the present, and I remained ecstatic observing the Templar fortress.

I would go there, to eat in the restaurants of the plaza, two or three times a week. I would find Gentlemen, Knights, crazy for many, with jacket, paper, pencil, without a horse, reciting, while I ate, poems in honor to the Templars, and to Tomar. Without achieving to pierce exactly in what they were communicating; I felt the emotion of their souls and their craving for light.

In there I would revive its construction by the great Templar Master, the annihilation of the Order, the skilled resolution of Henry the Navigator (1399-1460), self-calling himself Great Master of the Order of Christ. He would cover inside the Order´s mantle, the cravings of human redemption, controlling the wealth of the Templars. A lover of Africa, he would impel the discovery of new lands and the Christian worldwide expansion.

Portugal, as Spain, just as I was told by Ferdinand, descendant of the Lusitanian royalty, had bend to the British Empire, and its people, lack a sense of destiny. Only in these Tomar´s crazy, I found the light in my soul, and join in their dreams of localizing a New World, beyond the sea, where humanity could breathe the pure air of the spirit.

One of those days, Wilhelm invited me to spend the New Year in a castle near Innsbruck, in his yearned Tyrol, in Austria.

This was properly a Fortress from the Middle Ages, recently remodeled. The Chapel was covered by apocalyptic visions of angels, grouped in seven, and I expend the time, hours and hours, seated in front of them, unintentionally moving. I found myself among brothers.

- Maybe you know them, because you have been in South America, and the painter lives in Brazil, and the angels are Brazilian Models, said Wilhelm.

So, the last day of the year, Wilhelm took me to see the childhood residence of the famous painter. Exactly twenty-six years later, I fulfilled a childhood dream when, contemplating her juvenile paintings, these opened for me as windows, displaying a New World.

I didn't want to get out of the place, but Wilhelm took me again to the Castle, and left me alone. Almost without electric light, the place turned macabre. Just before midnight, in the middle of a cold winter covered by snow, somebody knock on the door shutter. I went down to open and, when separating the two doors of the gate, I found a middle-aged woman, with a smile of light in her lips, and a tray of sweets in her hands:

-Gelobt sei Jesus Christus.

- This has not gemüt, (without delicacy, with no soul, deprived of mind), she said without waiting for an answer, coming up to the kitchen.

Afterward she arranged a tablecloth, lit a candle, searched for a tiny flower, placed it in a vessel with water, prepared a cup of tea, exposed her tray of sweets, with a celestial smile she wished me a Merry Christmas as well as this Angel of Light left me alone.

Suddenly, the memories of the Red Knight invaded me again.

The next day I showed Wilhelm the icon asking him to search for any capable person that could translate the inscription at the bottom.

He came hours later with the translation:

- Sch… (the name of the Knight) will, again, remove the sword of its sheath .

- It has been said to me by an expert on this type of prophecies, that there is another augury united to this one:

- You must find Three James.

SWORD

The ugliest object for me is a pistol, that through a hidden mechanism it impels the murderous shot.

However, the sword always appeared me as extremely beautiful. It also has been used to disembowel, but it contains two aspects involving spirituality.

It says Paul that the sword symbolizes the Word of God, and we must acquire a sword (the Word of God) as part of our spiritual framework, so we may pierce in the marrow of everything happening to us.

The point discerns profoundly through the bones until revealing the core, the nucleus, what is one´s own.

If this is like that, the task of localizing a purely spiritual sword, it would be the capability of entering in a private genetic marrow, to obtain the light of the conscience, to discover the key of all the spiritualties that it is to know thyself .

Sharpening through a straight point, we could achieve to identify the irradiation of an internal knowledge, a personal wisdom, uncovering the physical elements of our human condition´s marrow and we will grasp the union with the creative Divinity.

With its double edge, continues Paul, separates the soul from the spirit.

Attaining our own nature, we observe that the sword has being following the trail, opening unerringly, in its inside infiltration, our soul from our spirit.

The Spirit, what it is matter assimilated by the divine, unties the Soul, what is only ethereal light, from the Physical, in order that she could ascend to the divine depths.

This same Spirit tears off from the Soul to surrender to the common ether for the wellbeing of all humanity.

The marrow, that it is a substance of genetic components, when acquiring its own light and life, returns to the soil from which it has been formed to be recycled by another being that needs it.

These two qualities of revealing the nature and dismembering the Spirit of the human Soul, are the two abilities contained in the Word of God.

Paul composed these teachings before the Gospels were written.

With these, he indicates that this Word of God is not the one printed in religious documents, of whoever denomination they may be.

The Word is the Eternal Truth, has no need of anyone to defend it, since she protects herself.

The Word of God it is the conscience of each human being.

In this way springs up from each one of us this internal Intuition, the resonance of the creative Word in our hearts, all-pervading the essence of the human beings, and untying the psychic elements from the spiritual ones.

In Jesus´ Passion of Luke, there is a phrase a little disturbing. Jesus asks his disciples:

- When I sent you without a coin bag, without sandals, without shoulder bag, do you miss something?

-Nothing, they answered.

-So now, the one who has a coin bag hold it, and the same thing with the shoulder bag, and the one who has not a sword, may he sell his mantle and buy one.

- Here we have two, they said.

- With that it is enough, Jesus answered.

Farther on they clasp Jesus with swords and clubs; meaning, some of them willing to reach to the essence of Christ separating his divinity from his humanity; and others, with sticks, only eager to damage His physical body, unenthusiastic to enter in the nature of the Savior, obtuse in their attempt to annihilate His eternal breath.

Obviously when Jesus said to Peter to hide his sword in its sheath, He was revealing him not to disclose, at that time, the Divinity of the Messiah.

When Jesus adds that the one who kills with a sword, with a sword dies, He was emptying on his followers, that those who want to reveal the Truth of the Messiah, must unveil their own.

If this is the moral duty arising from the status of The Red Knight, I fear for each human being, since we all have first to discover our own essence, as to emanate a feeling of love, light and truth, glimpsing the nature of Christ.

What I discovered later is that this task of The Red Knight is the work of each human being, of knowing thyself, recognize we are minor gods, and join the Father of the Lights, so to live eternally in Him.

They will see the one they pierced, it says the prophet, and with those words he indicates that the first Red Knight, the first they stabbed was Jesus.

THE CROSS

The Christian Religious Orders from the Middle Ages based their spiritual development meditating on the Crucifixion of Jesus.

When someone goes deeper into the Cross, his psychic development advances particularly.

The first thing the mind observes is how a being that has come, supposedly, to give us a way of internal development, accepts a death so harsh.

The crucifixion was to fix the hands as extended as possible, and the feet on a sliding base, firing the body to a permanent slippery posture, with the arms keeping fixed the body only with nervous elements, holding back into themselves. This lasted until the person died.

It is a state of attachment, on which the crucified cannot do anything to free him, and, if he wants to die, he cannot do it.

Later on, during the meditation, it appears the peoples that go by a roundabout way about the one nailed, winding equally impotent, unable to alleviate any ache so inhuman.

That perception makes you infiltrate in the kernel of these characters: Pilate, believing he has received the public power, doesn't want to assume his duty and washes his hands; the priests, manipulating all situations for their own interests; the beloved character and innocence of a peasant, the Cyrene, that when reaching home, tired of working, is forced to load the cross; Jesus´ mother, completely overturned because cannot believe which she is seeing; her companion, a former prostitute, the Magdalene, has risen in love with her son; the common people, dragged by the leaders, insulting constantly an innocent person; the soldiers, hitting Jesus, unnecessarily, once and again; a King calling him to his palace, to ill-treat Him; Herod manservants, insulting Him to please their king; the helpers of the priests, punishing Him so He may obey the order established by them; Veronica, the women weeping for Him… Jesus, in His abandonment, is silent in front of a few, encouraging others for their regeneration: I have come to show the Truth; do not weep for me, but for yourselves and your children…

Suddenly, the one meditating on it, perceives that there, on the Cross, is present the whole human wooden framework, appearing in the internal vision, like a spider's web completely intricate covering all humanity.

This perception impels, on the one who meditates, the necessity of searching for his position among these characters; it encourages you to locate yourself in the human history, pulling yourself out of the position you invented for yourself, the mask you forged.

Now you begin to pay attention to all the words of the Teacher: I am thirsty, my God why have you forgotten me? …

You grasp to discover the quintessence of Christianity: Jesus has come to bring, not the social well-being called peace, but the sword of division.

You do remember Simeon´s prophecy to Mary: This child of yours is placed as a stumbling stone in order that all may fall and may raise, and to you a sword will pierce your soul, in order that you would discover the feelings of the hearts.

You admire the sagacity of the good thief that, in a second, perceives that only mercy, compassion, love, is the only sword piercing through our being and channeling each other towards eternity.

The sword breaches the heart of Mary, when, in the Cross, says Jesus: Woman, here is your child. Child receive your mother.

And shouting strongly He gave us His Spirit.

A soldier, with a lance, pierces up to the essence of Jesus and shows us that the Word of God has achieved to divide the human DNA from the divine; the Spirit of Jesus has been disjointed, and from His side pours forth the Water of the divine biology, separated from the human physiology of the Blood.

The Centurion, observing, opening his eyes, perceiving, seeing vaguely, reveals Jesus´ heart: This, truly, is the Son of God

The excuse the priests used to condemn Jesus was that He indicated that He was the Son of God. A Roman Centurion, that did not shelter any belief, nor it hoped for a miracle, gives the conclusion to the Gospel of Matthew, that began with Three Astrologers of Orient searching for a Star, and finishing with the announcement of a military member, showing the Star.

The Knight grasps to understand that only with the physical observation, the contemplation, the analytical investigation, the scrutiny, the optical inspection, the awakening to the senses, generates for him a science that begins the advancement of the human being.

That internal quietness of feeling impotent to change any individual; that passivity, which it is not sleeping with irresponsibility, but a discontinuation of the mental work, it is the necessary quality for the development of the being.

Three are three nails; three, the used languages for the inscription of their sentence; one, the Crown of Thorns bleeding the two parts of the brain; three, the Mary’s witnessing His passing. The three human components intercross in a vertiginous boiling to return to their origin and award the freedom of the being.

Three, says John in his letters, are the witnesses of our eternal progress, the Spirit-Air, the Water and the Blood.

The meditation on Jesus´ Crucifixion has taken the Knight to halt, to break in his walk, to observe his environment, and so to separate the human genetics from the divine.

On that dismemberment, he finds the key of access to the psychic level, understanding that the Love to all is the only necessary element in his progress.

He goes through the tangle, the brushwood, the entanglement, the mischievous gossip to deceive, or the labyrinth, or the blabbermouth, or the waning, or the rolling misleading into a ball, this hank of junky of human spider's web, this absence of honesty in our lack of culture, through a direct and certain dot.

He stretches the comprehension of the whole process of human spirituality, entering that quietness of not wanting to change anybody, nor convince others but to renew oneself, in a Way requiring internal solitude, abandonment, quietness.

THE FIRST JAMES

THE BODY

TOM THUMB

MY FATHER

When I guessed I would find the first James in my birthplace, I did not know my task would be so arduous.

I thought already possessing one of the Three James for the mere action of being born in a particular place or by the name of a Temple, that it could be called by any other name.

But it was a Church dedicated to a Saint, huge, with a beard, mounted on a white horse, with a sword in his hands, cutting of the minds of those who did not have Faith in their hearts.

When I was four years old, I was lost, and the whole towns´ people were searching for me, and finally they found me, already at night, in the church, where I remained shut in while contemplating James’ painting, so it was the subconscious attraction directing my steps.

As a child, I was eight years old, I liked to play Indians and Cowboys, my favorites being the Native Americans; already moving aside from those who killed with pistols, to take part with those who fought with arrows, and my father gave me, the day of Three Wise Astrologers, a big cardboard horse. When receiving it, I mounted on it and, for surprise of many, I asked my father:

-And where is the sword?

I didn't want to play with arrows or guns but wanted to get a sword; and my father, from a hiding place, withdraw a sword, sharp and beautiful. For days I would admire it with pleasure and play with it, fighting against hosts of air and wasting heads throughout the earth. The cardboard horse, I divided in half, with the sword, to discover his essence. But the insubstantial horse had nothing, but air and I did not find on it any genetic material. My aunts, when listening to my actions, were scandalized and tried to me take to a psychiatrist punishing me harshly: If you do it with a toy, you could also do it with people.

I felt such a huge ache in my heart, and a rejection so enormous against them, that I, privately, answered them: So stupid are you not distinguishing a playing toy from a human being? Or do you think I am so mentally invalid that I cannot differentiate a material object of which it is human flesh?

They removed me the sword and the horse and have never see them again. They left the cardboard horse forgotten on a pile of junk, and they got rid of the sword, not allowing it to return to me.

My paternal ancestors, as I said it before, originated in the Pyrenees; obvious, along seven hundred years, join and mixed huge quantities of different genetic genes; my grandfather being of Irish or Scottish stock, I could not find it with certainty, my grandmother half Italian, from a town near Rome. Genetically I had my grandfather red hair, that when lit to the Sun, many children, during my infancy, called me devil, as on being all my hair shining red.

My grandfather had a business of dried fruits; in nineteen thirty-nine, enjoyed two trucks; my father droved one of them, since he was sixteen years old. When he was nineteen came the Spanish Civil War. My grandfather, in order that he would avoid the fight, compelled him to choose the Air Force, and from Murcia he was sent to Russia for training. After three years of drilling, he returned to Valencia, arriving when the war was over. He did not participate on it. A neighbor, jealous by some hidden motive, would not stop chasing him until seeing him executed. He was sentenced seven years into a Concentration Camp in North Africa; and thirty-three years of home arrest, a total of forty years, that finished, precisely with the arrival of Democracy. The new government named him Commander of the Air Force and awarded him a dignity that was stolen from him.

I communicated the histories of how I was lost in Church, and of the sword, although I have many, to make understand the freedom I possessed from birth (my father gave me the home keys when I was eight years old), and the full complete trust of my parents, that allow their small child to play with a genuine sword. With accuracy, from the childhood, my parents gave me the eternal properties they lacked in their existence.

AMPARO

My mother was born in Madrid and she was twelve years old when started the Spanish Civil War. She was sent to Valencia, along with her sister; to whom they destined to Alzira and my mother to Algemesi. Precisely King James I was killed between these two townships. She came at night to this small villa without electric light, and an elderly lady, all dressed in black, only with a tooth in her mouth, when seeing her, she pointed at her saying:

- I want her.

Viçantica, that was the name of that lady, adopted her. She was the owner of a bakery, thin and energetic; she gave life to all her environment. She lived with her niece, Amparo, with similar personality, a few years older that my mother.

Amparo is the best good person I have known in my existence and belongs to a very reduced number of people without wickedness. My mother says that Viçantica still was better than her. In my infancy I knew many of these good people, but now I find them very, very scarce; although they lived during times of a lot of hate and resentment in the middle of a Civil War. There is not a being I would prefer to live with more than aunt Amparo, and she, without any genetic links of any type, grafts in the point of the sword of my spinal cord. When a was three years old she took me to church, to present me, not to Jesus or Mary, but to James.

When my father returned from the African Concentration Camp, the women told me, he was so handsome that all of them wanted to marry him, but mother was the only one that conquered him, knowing, even, of the social slab she was assuming. One of the punishments imposed to him was to go to Mass every Sunday and to participate in any religious mission coming to town. My father told me once, that one of the gloomiest days of his life was when, at nine, I went into the Seminary to become a Priest, and one of the happiest, when, at fourteen, I got out of there.

After my birth, my father worked in the bakery, and the business prospered a lot, thanks to my father and to the character so positive of my mother. They woke up, and me, at three in the morning to light the fire of the oven and heat it, while my mother, Viçantica and Amparo kneaded the bread. They left me on the counter, and about six, a nun, living in the annexed Convent to the bakery, opened the door for the priest to come in, she grabbed the basket on which I was sleeping, and took me to daily Mass. When Mass was over, she returned me to the bakery, and I remained there until the early hours of the afternoon, when they cleaned it out and returned home.

The small Convent of the one I am speaking was the house where lived Josefa Naval Girbes, a universal female saint, of the one we know very little. Viçantica, as a child, received her Faith through her, and, being moreover a neighbor, possibly tied her with a few beloved soul knots, that later, I also received as heritage, since all these nuns were always connected with my mother, having a share in all my childhood experiences.

The neighbor in front of the bakery sent to the Pope of Rome, each year, the candle for the Via Crucis of Good Friday, all of it covered with multicolored wax flowers. She made me one candle, for my First Communion, a wax light, she said, much more beautiful that the one which she sent to the Pope.

To me it was the Earthly Paradise, but not for the people surrounding me, since the hate and resentment from the Civil War raged against the losers. There I learned to listen, not the language of the lips, but the one from the heart, that for some reason, always was emphasized during autumn, with that melancholy of not being able to keep the placidness of summer and deal again with the unpleasant fall and destruction.

Berca Street attracted your soul at the beginning of September.

Algemesi was a group of houses founded by the Vice Goths, of Arrian faith, that, as told by the people, put a donkey in the field, and let it go, and out of its trail, they traced this semicircular and tight street, in the form of an Arab sword, of a few three hundred meters long. The donkey went to drink out of the well, and therefore, on a side of the street we still find this font. In the initial point of the street, they build a Chapel, that, after the Arab invasion, became a Mosque, and at the end of the street is found a tiny plaza with a source surrounded by date palms, and out of there expanded the township.

With the arrival of King James, I, they reorganized the community, and those of Jewish descend established themselves in Muntanya Street, opposed to Berca.

A little time later, the people of the place found, hidden, inside a mulberry tree, just across the Mosque, the image of a Black Madonna, that the ancient inhabitants of the place, the Arrians, veiled to avoid its destruction by the Arab invasion.

Sometime after the Reconquest, the town people organized a procession with the image of this Black Madonna, that the Government of Spain has declared it of Tourist National Interest, but really it is of Universal Quality.

Ramon Diego has extremely detailed studies of all of it; I have asked him to publish them since are very interesting. What the procession is all about is the development of the soul. It begins with a few twelve years old children, garbed as priests, explaining, after been paid, the origins of our earth, using the teachings of the book of the Genesis. Following them are the dances, the first one those of the Little Shepherds, the Artichoke, the Warriors, the Muixeranga, the Popular Dances, indicating the progress of the soul through the different stages of development. Behind they follow the Faithful, with lit candles, and among them, all this procession is image of the development of all human soul, circulate all the biblical characters from Adam and Eve, Caleb with a beautiful cluster of grapes, showing the prosperity of the Promised Land, until the Maccabees, and after them, the las ones, the Twelve Apostles of the Teacher.

The soul develops from the childhood’s desires for knowing the Natural Sciences, the ephemeral passing by through dance, music and voice, advancing with a lot of cheer until reaching the Tornejant, the Initiate that has achieved to separate himself out of the group, symbol of the soul already moving closer to her divine fullness, dressed in rose with roses, and only accompanied by a drum; he takes a thin stick, strong and flexible, and waving it to symbolize a snake, facing the icon of