Last December, taking advantage of the Christmas days off, I once again felt nostalgic for adventure, for beauty and for the great architectural landmarks of the past and without a moment's hesitation, I once again trusted my intuition, especially when a name appeared on the luminous horizon of my vision, just as the Great Pyramid was built, not only to endure over time, but also to be the symbol of the luminous horizon of Pharaoh Cheops or Khufu: Toledo.
Toledo, as I think I have said on other occasions, is the perfect destination for all those who wish to embark on a journey through time, which also includes, by the way, the opportunity to feel, more or less than its maximum splendor, the Borges' famous and masterful formula, similar, in essence, to Einstein's relativism, where yesterday is today and also still.
It is difficult, then, for one not to be seduced by any of the innumerable charms of this capital of forgotten empires, as the German poet Rilke described it, but also, and this is an important detail, because of the inevitable magnetism that comes with being, in addition to , one of the main capitals of the Three Book Cultures -Jewish, Muslim and Christian- that gave it a special character, whose mixture of exotic charm has always been a source of inspiration.
If in the past I had the opportunity to show you, as far as possible, part of the charm of an old Jewish synagogue, today I intend to take a turn - who knows if 0 or 180 degrees - and show you one of the most magnificent monasteries Christians of Spain: that of San Juan de los Reyes.
San Juan de los Reyes -a reference to the kings of Unity, Isabel and Fernando, the Catholic Monarchs- is an immeasurable building, which arouses passions and could be added, even at the risk of raising suspicions among some conservative sectors, which is also a small symphony, whose notes, assembled in the masterful score of Sacred Geometry, gracefully flow into the metaphorical ballroom of the Universe.
The title that the experts give to its style, 'Elizabethan Gothic', is rather honorary, in my humble opinion, because like many other buildings of its time and style, built when the Gothic began to be metaphorical autumn to take refuge in the non less metaphorical winter of other styles, such as baroque, could well be classified within that English or flamboyant Gothic, which through its incendiary pinnacles was beginning to see the medieval brilliance of its own star fade.
A star that, having mysteriously arisen in the obsolete horizons of a preceding Romanesque style, was going to end up disappearing in the same mysterious way, until it was remembered, centuries later, when a possible entrenchment of the architectural arts made an attempt at recovery -more responding to one fashion than to another thing- under the epigraph of neogothic, which reproduced the form, but little or nothing the essence or the spirit that the medieval builders imprinted on their creations.
This spirit can still be seen as soon as we look at the superb details of this monastery, in whose church, for example, we will find the old medieval symbology again and in whose main vault, the eight-pointed star of the philosophers -the same one that guided the Magi to Bethlehem-, the one that Fulcanelli alluded to so frequently in his outstanding treatises, will remind us of the magnificence and unavoidable messenger of other points of interest, such as Burgos Cathedral itself.
With the superb columns of the nave and the transept, we will also recover the place once occupied by the sacred forests, reproduced in a stone, which, as specified by the great German romantic writer, Goethe, rises towards the heights, precisely towards the place to where the Gothic builders fixed their gaze, while through the sifted light of some windows, which unfortunately, little or nothing of those others, original and treated with the mysterious technique of alchemy, we will be witnesses of that eternal confrontation between light and darkness, which will fill the space with philosophical evocations, which in some way also served as special effects to create favorable environments to free that comparative scapegoat, which is always the unconscious.
The monastery also has two formidable superimposed cloisters: the lower one, with a baroque symbology, which regardless of its apparently shameless meaning -as I already anticipated in my previous post, the baroque, always fluctuating between the festive and the tragic, as the Spanish spirit- suggests the concealment of a remarkable knowledge of botany and its properties and the upper cloister, from which to obtain, not only magnificent perspectives of the monastery, but also of that no less relevant space, the garden or simile of the Paradysum through which the monks accessed an unprecedented state of well-being and contemplation, but also marveled at the complex, laborious and, without a doubt, masterful piece of unmistakable Mudejar essence: its magnificent coffered ceiling.
In short: San Juan de los Reyes, a monastery in which to be seduced by something more than a simple architectural and artistic landmark.
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