Even the cloisters of the great monasteries had the corridors facing the four cardinal points, so that the one facing north remained in the shade longer and was therefore the coldest place of all.
With the porticos of the churches and the great cathedrals, basically the same thing happened, so I was not much surprised, when I discovered that part of the theme that the medieval stonemasons had masterfully worked on the north portal of the cathedral I was visiting in At those precise moments, it was dedicated to the torment that awaited sinners in Hell and also, to the Last Judgment.
I have not said it before, but there, planted in front of the suggestive cover, I remembered that in medieval thought, the north was associated with the Enemy, with the Devil and his herald, furious and with icy breath, was none other than that wind. ungovernable, which is called Acheron.
Acheron, if we enter the fantastic literature, was also the inheriting kingdom of the morbid necromantic arts of the people of Hyperboria, where Robert E. Howard located many of the adventures of his best-known character, Conan the Barbarian, and where the hero he had to face the most abject conspiracies of the perfidious black magicians, being, curiously the most dangerous of them, the one who bore the name of Thot-Amun.
However, leaving aside the mythological connotations of the characters from Howard and the Hyboria Era, I thought, observing those grotesque images, where the demons acted little more or less than as ogre butchers with a special devotion to making human stews in their steaming cauldrons, that in reality, the fidelity with which the medieval stonemasons represented the torture and punishments that awaited sinners, had a very great weight on the superstitious society of the time.
And this was more evident, especially when these types of representations, without modifying one iota of their message, were revealed –generally, at the north gate- of those great landmarks of humanity, which undoubtedly were and continue to be, the immeasurable Gothic cathedrals.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.
