Cova des Cuieram - A Pilgrimage of a Kind - Celia Rees

I blogged here about my first visit to the Balearic island of Ibiza. My fascination for the island hasn't left me. I knew that one visit would never be enough. This September, I went on another Yoga Retreat with my daughter, Catrin. We would have a chance to explore the island further, visit the hippy market (always a must and I missed it the first time round).

We were also determined to visit Cova des Cuieram, the cave of Tanit, Goddess of the White Island, that we'd failed to find the year before.

The  cave is near to the town of Cala San Vicente in the North East corner of the island.

It is situated high up in the hills with commanding views down to the sea. From the 5th Century BC it was a Sanctuary to the Phoenician goddess, Tanit. Although there is little to see from the outside, it is a large underground complex of interconnected caverns, running deep into the ground.  Discovered, or re-discovered, in 1907 and excavated, the cave complex was found to contain 600 bell shaped terracotta female figures, thousands of other objects, figurines, fragments of ceramics and a plaque in in Punic to 'our lady, to Tanit the powerful....'

These artefacts are now on display in the Archaeological Museum in Eivissa. We did manage to visit there last year but never made it to the Sanctuary where the objects were discovered. They were votive offerings left there by those who visited the shrine, either to ask for Tanit's intercession, to give thanks, or to appease her. Not so very different from the little plaques and objects found in Catholic churches, left near statues of saints or the Virgin Mary, in thanks or asking for blessing. In Britain and Ireland people still tie notes and ribbons onto trees that grow near to sacred wells or springs. Even coins in a fountain belong to a need we've felt since ancient times to make a connection of some kind by giving and leaving something of ourselves behind. 

Just as there is an ancient compulsion to leave offerings, there is an equally ancient compulsion to visit places of significance. Whether we call them religious centres or places of power, they are often one and the same. Just as old gods meld into new gods, so their places of worship change hands, what doesn't seem to change is our need to make pilgrimage and leave offerings there.  

Where I holiday in Italy, outside Siena, the Via Francigena runs practically past the door. Modern pilgrims in hiking boots, carrying backpacks and plastic water bottles still walk the centuries old way along white roads, farm tracks, main roads and dual carriageways following the ancient pilgrim route that leads to Rome. 

Our visit to the Cova des Cuieram felt very like a pilgrimage. Although it is marked as a tourist attraction, it is not easily gained. It is situated off the road, high up on the side of a deep valley. The way to it is marked by the ancient sign of the Mother. 

There are other, easier approaches by car but the route we took was on foot. We walked about a kilometre from the town of Cala de Sant Vicent and then followed the signs up the hill. 

 The way was steep, roughly paved and cut into the side of the slope, snaking up the hillside, it had the feel of a way that had been trodden since ancient times, taken up recently by the hippies who had colonised Ibiza in the Sixties and probably painted the fading signs of the Mother that showed the way. 

The route was hard going, especially in the heat of the day with insufficient water (my fault). Testing to the mind, body and spirit which I suppose all pilgrimages are, or should be. Not far from the top, we were about to give up, when we met a couple who shared their water and told us it really wasn't much further. A serendipitous meeting. If I was a certain kind of person, I'd say they were sent by the Goddess. At the top there was more water, a litre bottle, still cold. Maybe the Goddess left it there for us, or for other thirsty pilgrims to her shrine, or maybe Ibiza is just that kind of place.  

                             
Even though the shrine was firmly barred and padlocked (despite guide book and website claims that it would be open), it was worth the hard climb. The opening to the main chamber still held its chthonic mystery, perhaps even more so, since it could not be entered, only peered into - Tanit's secrets are hard won.

Each of the barred chambers was festooned with offerings of all kinds put there by visitors: necklaces, bracelets, stones, crystals, shells, flowers, real and artificial, curling and fading photographs, ribbons, even hair bands and bobbles, as though everyone who went there felt compelled to leave something of themselves, as they had been doing in this place for thousands of years. I liked that feeling of continuity of behaviour, if not belief.

 The place was high up, cooled by a constant breeze, peaceful, with just the sound of the wind in the trees. It was a good place for some quiet contemplation, gazing out over the plain and down to the sea.  We dutifully made our own offerings, lit our candles, offered our thanks and maybe our prayers and then, after a little while, we left to begin the long climb down. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

 

Mirror City - Celia Rees

1960s Guide to Ibiza

I recently found this guide book for Ibiza. It belonged to my aunt. She and my mother visited the island in the 1960s. The guide book is full of pictures of islanders in traditional costume and holiday makers having seaside fun. Not a club in sight.

Ibiza has changed a bit since then. 

Its reputation as the Party Island began with the hippies in the Sixties. It even gets a mention from Joni Mitchell.

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road
There were lots of pretty people there
Reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue
They said, "How long can you hang around?"
I said a week, maybe two
just until my skin turns brown...

Joni Mitchell, California

Joni must have been tripping down that red dirt road to some of the first open-air beach parties. The other 'pretty people there' being Mike Oldfield, Frank Zappa, Robert Plant, Terence Stamp and Pink Floyd. The islands boho reputation took root in the Fifties when it became a refuge for Americans trying to escape McCarthyism. By the '80s and '90s Ibiza the Hippy Island had changed to Ibiza the Clubbing Island but it is now showing signs of returning to its past.

I made my first visit to Ibiza in April this year. I was going on a Yoga Retreat and, as soon as I arrived I felt very much like the New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, when she visited the island in the Fifties. She immediately felt 'at peace within my own mind, as if I were on an unearthly shore'.

I discovered Janet Frame after seeing Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table. The third volume of her autobiographical trilogy, The Envoy From Mirror City, describes her time on Ibiza. 

 'I came into the daylight of the hill where I looked down on the harbour and the buildings across the harbour, perfectly mirrored in the clear tideless ocean,' she wrote on her first morning. Each day, she explored the idea of the mirrored city further. 

'As I sat at my table typing, I looked each day at the city mirrored in the sea, and one day I walked around the habour road to the opposite shore where the real city lay that I knew only as the city in the sea, but I felt as if I were trying to walk behind a mirror and I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real city lay within as the city of the imagination.'

The Envoy From Mirror City - Janet Frame

I had just started writing and I remember being transfixed by the Mirror City. The idea has stayed with me ever since. it is a perfect (and perfectly lyrical)  analogy for the magical allure, the obsessions and impossibilities of the writing life. We are always waiting for, wanting to be, the envoy from Mirror City. We know that the city is there, just beneath the surface of things, not quite real, not quite an illusion and not quite stable. It's the place we long to be but as soon as we get near, it begins to shimmer and change and disappear. All we can hope for is a visit from the envoy who calls on us from time to time to remind us of the city's proximity. 

Although the Mirror City had stayed with me, I'd completely forgotten that it was Ibiza until I found a reference to Janet Frame and a quotation from The Envoy From Mirror City in Stephen Armstrong's The White Island. I was going to visit a place which had become a part of the landscape of my imagination. It felt satisfyingly serendipitous and a propitious omen for the Yoga Retreat.

Yoga Floor  - Can Amonita

I was there for a week, living in a beautiful place, practicing yoga every day. It was a good time to renew my visa to the Mirror City. I felt very much at home on the island and wasn't surprised to learn that it was a place sacred to the Goddess. On Ibiza, she took the form of Tanit brought here by the Phoenicians. Related to the Moon Goddess, Astarte, Tanit was traduced by the Romans and by the Israelites as a receiver of child sacrifice, the legend seemingly re-enforced by evidence from large necropoli, called Tophet, found near Phoenician sites in what was the land of Canaan and at Carthage, which contained the cremated remains of infants, new born and still born children. This, however, is open to interpretation. Just like the Mirror City, if we look beneath the surface appearance, different pictures emerge. The children might well have died naturally and then been given to the Mother for Her protection.  That's what I prefer to think.

In the Archaeological museum in Ibiza Town, Tanit is depicted in different forms from this bust of a rather severe Carthaginian matron to these much more basic and more primitive figurines. 

Tanit - Ibiza Archaeological Museum

Goddess Figurines, Ibiza Archaeological Museum

 



She is often depicted not as a figure at all but as a symbol. Sometimes, She is reduced even further, to a circle above a triangle with vestigial outstretched arms - a version of the universal symbol for the Goddess found from different times and in different places all over the world.

Traces of her worship have been found all over Ibiza. Perhaps She is still there. Certainly, there's a magic about the island, a sense of mystery. it has a powerful attraction, whether spiritual or hedonistic, which calls people back over and over again.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com