This week is Holy Week and the entire Spanish ¨Community¨ (the communities are like states) of Andalucia (the southernmost community of which Cádiz is a province) goes crazy over this festival. If anyone had any doubts that Catholicism may at times be guilty of idol worship they need only come here during holyweek and observe the somber processions that have a fanatical following all across the south of Spain. Essentially, these are the most somber parades you could ever hope to attend. All the major parishes of the city turn out with everyone from little kids to grown men decked out in those uniforms that we as Americans instantly recognize as being the kind that the Ku Klux Klan wear.
As the procession approaches the first thing you hear is the marching band despite the fact that they´re situated at the very rear of the procession. Slowly they come into view, a band of masked, hooded, and robed people (each procession has it’s own colour scheme) carrying great silver staffs topped with candles. Supposedly the uniform is meant to project the wearer´s spirit to Heaven so that they may be closer to God while wearing it. They´re covered from head to toe in this garb and even their hands are hidden by white gloves meaning that the only part of their flesh that´s at all shown are their eyes through the little slits in the hood. After this great mass of hooded people you are all of a sudden confronted with an enormous float carried by a score of men underneath it and 4 men on each of its corners. The float is a shrine to some sort of religious person or scene. The most common are the grief stricken, but remarkably stoic, virgin mother, the last supper, and the resurrected Christ. Immediately behind the float there is the parish´s marching band, outfitted in what almost look like military uniforms (like most marching bands to be fair). Though the atmosphere and most especially, the floats, are very somber the marching band continues with a victorious sort of song. Which I suppose, taking into account the biblical story that has inspired this week, makes sense.
An interesting custom that most of the little kids and some older women partake in during these holy week processions is the gathering of large ball of wax. As the floats have to stop every few minutes to let them carrying rest, the progress of the processions throughout the city tends to be very choppy. So in these brief but frequent intermissions little kids and older women go out and ask the hooded kids/men to pour wax on their hands from the candles they’re holding (keep in mind…that really has to hurt). After they’ve got a good amount of wax on their hands they roll up the still malleable wax up into a ball and then proceed to ask someone else for more wax so that the ball may grow. By the end of the week many people have balls of wax at least as big as a baseball, some even approaching the size of a small melon. To be completely honest, that’s probably something I would have been very into had I been a youth here =P.
