Holy Week in Spain

April 6, 2007 10:16 AM

Spain's El Mundo newspaper has an online photo gallery of beautiful, haunting images from Holy Week celebrations around Spain. (More) 20 minutos also has a great gallery. Even for nonbelievers, the spectacle is impressive. Wikipedia explains a little about the traditions, and addresses the sartorial similarities between the procession participants and Klan members.
posted by veggieboy (10 comments total)

How can I have gotten to be as old as I am today without ever once knowing that Spanish Catholics (and others?) dress up exactly like the KKK?
posted by DU at 10:34 AM on April 6, 2007

It's the other way around, DU.
posted by peeedro at 10:48 AM on April 6, 2007

How can I have gotten to be as old as I am today without ever once knowing that Spanish Catholics (and others?) and the KKK dress up exactly alike?
posted by DU at 10:51 AM on April 6, 2007

Hauntingly beautiful. Thanks.
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 11:04 AM on April 6, 2007

My inner black man is very confused right now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:40 AM on April 6, 2007

Totally metal.
posted by The Straightener at 11:43 AM on April 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

I've video of this in highschool spanish classes. There's also a lot of self-flagilation that goes on, right?

Intresting that the LGF types never post pictures like this and scream "RELIGION OF PEACE!?"
posted by delmoi at 11:48 AM on April 6, 2007

Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about this issue in his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Very often, these types of paranoid secretive organisations (like the KKK) adopt the trapings and patterns of the very groups they are opposing in a form of psychological projection.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy.

posted by euphorb at 12:18 PM on April 6, 2007

delmoi, there is no self-flagelation involved in Spain. I am not sure whether they still do it in a small village in Northern Spain, but that would be all.
posted by beguemot at 2:37 PM on April 6, 2007

I can assure you there were enough closed streets today (for that^^) that driving in Madrid was pure self-flagelation.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 6:11 PM on April 6, 2007