“What did Christ do for three days?”
“I imagine that, among other things, he forgave Judas.” Such was a certain priest’s answer to a question on Holy Week.
The potential of generations past, the tender joys of countless lives, the hopes of myriad unwritten histories—how many of these now dwell in hell? Yet hell’s gates are ajar, and by God’s grace may be transgressed.
Occasionally, Holy Week in Spain elicits comparisons between different, regional processions, wherein a certain cleavage forms between admirers of what is stereotyped as the typical Andalusian keeping of this observance (usually a reference to the modern, specifically Sevillian, floats and attendant clamor) and those of Castile or Leon. The latter is generally more sober and, in the opinion of some observers, less prone to a de facto idolatrous regard for the figures represented.
It is true that, in some cities, Holy Week seems to entail a second carnival, an association which is not in itself spurious but bears clarifying. Whereas Mardi Gras and celebrations at the close of February mark the end of winter, Good Friday and Easter more or less correspond to the spring equinox.
Carnival takes us from the feast of the Epiphany to the burning of a ‘carnival king:’ from the veneration of the messianic king, by the three wise kings, to the anticipation of the monarch’s death and triumph. If carnival is the beginning of spring, Good Friday and Easter are that season’s zenith and fulfillment.
In cosmological terms, the rebirth of the sun at Christmas reminds us of the birth of the messianic king, and gives way to anticipation of his crowning at carnival (his entry into Jerusalem), before the ascetic ordeal of his fast. The purging before glory begins with Lent, culminating with entering into and defeating death, and experiencing a second birth in the Resurrection: a second Christmas and the realization of that which was anticipated at the burning of the carnival king effigy before Lent.
Carnival is a ritual reminder of why we fast at Lent and what will come by way of fasting. It is not marked in the liturgical calendar because it is not itself part of the path we are walking with Christ, but it’s a signpost along that path. The seasons represent a year-long natural cycle of death (autumn), descent to Hades (winter), rebirth (spring), and ascension (summer).
Holy Week is its microcosm. The infernal elements with which carnival symbolism presents us, including the burning of the carnival king, receive their meaning between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with Holy Saturday—the Harrowing of Hell—as the secret bonfire of “the lamb for a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:7), a lamb “without blemish” (1 Peter 1:19).
The cross is an image at once of immobility and willing sacrifice, and represents the cessation of physical and mental activity, the slaying of the animal, reactive mind. Following this, we attain entry into a state of contemplative absorption. The reactive mind is thereby given new life, no longer autonomous from us, but submissive.
The animal horns and hides typical of folkloric rites marking the end of winter correspond to the association of such elements with kingship, the latter office requiring the slaying of the animal self. These recur in Holy Week with the messianic king’s identification with, and overcoming the death of, the lamb.
Obedience unto death requires self-mastery as well as self-surrender, wherein we understand Christ as both king and servant.
The Harrowing of Hell, then, is the rescue of the self that follows the defeat of the self, a lucid absorption that may rescue the human condition, the very light which turbulent minds perceive as scorching hell-fire. These are the infernal fires which, in Pythagorean tradition, were identified with the sun and stars above; the descent leading to ascent.
Before, the body or material conditions were perceived as having priority over the mind, like a dead, overbearing weight. Traditionally, this is often represented as an injured or blind father: the deterministic momentum of past generations: the incapacity of the subject to break free from his being brutally conditioned by relationships of cause and effect.
The spiritual epiphany associated with the descent into hell at Holy Saturday, then, is that consciousness has priority over matter, and not vice-versa: Jesus rescues Adam from Hades; the gross is ruled by the subtle.
The weight of sin drenching the past and the world is dissolved by mercy (thus the speculation concerning Judas with which we began).
Scriptural and literary examples of this abound: in the Bible, apart from Christ, we read of blind father Tobit being restored by Tobias and blind Isaac made to give his inheritance to Jacob; in the Aeneid, we have the injured Anchises rescued from the burning (infernal) Troy by Aeneas; in the holy grail stories, an injured king is healed by the grail attained by a noble knight; in the Qur’an, a blind Jacob has his sight restored by his son Joseph; etc.
The Gospel tells us that the full reality of this experience will manifest in the resurrected body, a bodily subjectivity determined by ‘the inner’, or higher, rather than ‘the outer’, or lower, whose mastery over that reactive, egoic condition in which we used to dwell is the fruit of pious servitude.
Resurrection comes by way of death; sovereignty is an act of submission.
