The Santa Compaña: what it is and where the Galician legend comes from

What is the Santa Compaña?

One of the classic descriptions is Jesús Rodríguez López's, in Supersticiones de Galicia y preocupaciones vulgares, a collection of Galician superstitions first published in 1895 and expanded in a second edition in 1910, which is the one we've read. According to his account, the procession sets off on the stroke of twelve: the dead leave the church by its great door. Leading them is someone still alive, burdened with the cross and the holy-water bucket and forbidden to look back. The souls' lights are invisible; the only things that give the procession away are a smell of candle wax and a draught of air as it goes by.

To be rid of the job, the leader has to find somebody else and pass them the cross and the bucket. And the procession, the author added, tends to stop in front of the home of someone local, whose death it announces by throwing stones onto the roof.

Other Galician versions recorded later talk of bright lights, and of the dead carrying the coffin of the person who's about to die, or leaving it beside their door.

What else is it called?

All sorts of things. In Galicia and western Asturias people also speak of the compañía, the procesión das ánimas (procession of souls), the estadea, the estantiga, the hoste, the rolda or the ronda, and of as da noite, "the ones of the night", among other names. In Asturias it's the huestia or güestia; in Portugal, the estantigua.

Not every folklorist treats these as the same thing. Eladio Rodríguez González drew a line between the Compaña, a procession of souls in torment along the lanes, and the estadea, a single soul haunting the graveyards. Manuel Murguía, on the other hand, made no such distinction.

What should you do if you meet it?

According to the belief, the danger isn't seeing it but being drawn in: anyone who runs into it without protecting themselves ends up joining the procession. The remedies scholars have recorded are very specific. Don't look at it, pretend you haven't seen it and step quietly out of its way. Draw a circle on the ground with the star of Solomon inside and stand in the middle. Or, if all else fails, throw yourself face down on the ground until the last of them has gone by.

Not everyone can see it. On the island of Ons, off the Galician coast, people said that someone who sees it can tread on the left foot of the person next to them so that they can see it too. As favours between friends go, debatable.

How far back does it go?

You'll often hear that it's thousands of years old. What can be documented starts in 1842. That year the Englishman George Borrow published The Bible in Spain, the account of his travels around the country. In Galicia, heading for Cape Finisterre, he hired a guide in Padrón, a man who'd been a sailor. Crossing a vast moor as the sun went down, the guide grew uneasy: if a haze came on, he said, they'd meet the Estadéa.

Borrow asked what he meant. The guide said he'd met it once, on a moor much like this one, while he was with several women: a thick haze came down, suddenly a thousand lights shone above their heads, there was a wild cry and they all fell to the ground. "The Estadéa are the spirits of the dead which ride upon the haze, bearing candles in their hands," he explained. If they ran into "the assembly of the souls", the guide added, he'd abandon Borrow at once and run and run until he drowned himself in the sea, somewhere about Muros. That night, to the guide's great relief, there was no haze.

Then came the dictionaries and the folklorists. In 1863 Francisco J. Rodríguez included the word compaña in his Galician dictionary, alongside estadaíña and estantigua. In 1895 came the first edition of Rodríguez López's book; the 1910 edition quotes some verses by Victoriano Novo y García: a lad heading home in the dark makes out lights among the pines, the restless souls of neighbours who've died; he makes the sign of the cross, mutters a prayer and hurries on, and when day breaks the lights of the Compaña die away.

Rodríguez López even had a little fun in a footnote: such tales, he wrote, were happily a thing of the past, and the souls in purgatory must simply be better represented nowadays.

And before 1842? We don't know. A belief turning up in writing in the nineteenth century doesn't mean it was born then. It just means nobody wrote it down earlier, or that we haven't found it.

Where does the legend come from?

This is where it pays to tread carefully, because it's where imaginations run wildest. Several writers give it a Christian, medieval origin; after all, Rodríguez López defined it as a gathering of souls from purgatory. C. Lisón Tolosana, who wrote a book on the Compaña, pointed to Nordic and Germanic roots. Others, such as Alonso Romero and M. Alberro, argue for a Celtic origin and compare it with other processions of the dead that foretell misfortune: the Irish Fairy Host, the Scottish sluagh and the Welsh toili. And the editor of one reprint of Rodríguez López saw in these beliefs "traces of cults older than Christianity".

Similarities between countries don't prove a common origin, and none of these theories has been proved. The label of an age-old Celtic belief is an interpretation, not a fact.

Literature, at least, took it up. Valle-Inclán made the lights of the Santa Compaña glimmer among the maize fields to warn one of his characters, the nobleman Don Juan Manuel de Montenegro, of his death.

Has the Santa Compaña ever passed through Santiago?

As far as we know, nobody ever wrote it down. Not one sighting in the city is on record: the descriptions talk of lanes, hillsides, villages and fog. What Santiago does have are perfect corners for telling the story, such as the grounds of the old Bonaval friary, now a park stepped into terraces behind stone walls, right next to its old cemetery.

And if you like a question with a catch, the Cathedral has its own: what was the Botafumeiro really for?

Fact or legend.

• Folk belief: the Santa Compaña, a procession of souls that foretells a death. There are no documented sightings.
• Fact: the earliest written mention we know of is George Borrow's, in 1842, as the Estadéa; the word compaña appears in a Galician dictionary in 1863, and Rodríguez López describes it in detail in a book first published in 1895 and expanded in 1910.
• Unresolved: its origin. Christian and medieval, Celtic or Germanic are all hypotheses.
• We don't know: how it was told before 1842.
• A nuance: some writers distinguish the estadea, a single soul, from the Compaña, the whole procession.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on Witches and Wandering Souls: Compostela's Legends, at the stop "The Procession of the Dead", at the entrance to Bonaval Park. The smell of wax links it to another stop on the same route, "Wax Droplets on Water", which tells the story of the Inquisition's case against Marta Fernández, accused of witchcraft, of being a meiga. Santiago's free route, Santiago Cathedral and Its Squares, circles the outside of the building, and for the practical side of your trip there's our Santiago de Compostela guide.

Further reading

• Jesús Rodríguez López, Supersticiones de Galicia y preocupaciones vulgares, Lugo, 1895; 2nd, expanded edn, Buenos Aires, Editorial Nova, [1910]. https://archive.org/details/supersticionesde00rodruoft
• George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, London, 1842, chapter XXIX (Project Gutenberg, no. 415). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/415
• M. Alberro, "La Santa Compaña en el NO de la Península Ibérica y en otros países célticos como Irlanda, Escocia y Gales", Revista de Folklore, no. 336 (2008), pp. 183–187, Fundación Joaquín Díaz. https://funjdiaz.net/folklore/pdf/rf336.pdf