AN INTERVIEW WITH BEEBE BAHRAMI

BY SANDIE SEDGBEER

Since the 12th Century, Pilgrims have been walking the Camino, a network of roots traversing France, Spain, and Portugal that lead to the shrine of the Apostle St. James the Great in the Cathedral of Santiago De Compostela in Galicia, in Northwestern Spain.

In recent years, interest in this past has surged to the point where more than 200,000 people worldwide undertake some or all of this 500-mile journey every year.

Over the past decade, I've interviewed several travelers who've made movies or written travel guides and memoirs about the Camino. And during that time, not in any of their narratives has anyone breathed a word about the ancient mysteries of web-footed Virgin Marys, mothers, goddesses, Templar Knights, fairytales, and geese that fill the pages of the Book, the Way of the Wild Goose.

Three pilgrimages follow geese, stars, and hunches on the Camino De Santiago. I have with me today the award-winning travel writer, anthropologist, essayist, and author Beebe Bahrami. Welcome!

Beebe Bahrami: Thank you, Sandy.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So you are known for your travel narratives, your guidebooks, and your memoirs, which include Café Oc: A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne, Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places, The Spiritual Traveler, Spain, Moon Camino de Santiago: Sacred Sites, Historic Villages, Local Food & Wine, and of course, the Way of the Wild Goose. So tell us, what first attracted you to the Camino?

Beebe Bahrami: Oh, I was a college student in exchange student in the south of Spain in 1986, and I was in a history of Spain course, and my professor uttered those three words, Camino de Santiago, and I didn't even know yet what they were, he hadn't started lecturing about them, but they just wedged their way into my cell tissue. And I thought, whatever that is, I must find out more about it. And then, when I learned that it was this historic medieval pilgrimage route across not just northern Spain but all of Spain, Portugal, France, and Webs across Europe, I fell in love with this idea, this high adventure of becoming a pilgrim on the road to Santiago. And it took nine years, but I finally got there, and I never stopped returning. So it's a magical journey.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You said you stepped onto the Camino in 1995, but right from that moment, you felt that you had found your place in the world. I mean, what was that feeling like?

Beebe Bahrami: A very visceral feeling of belonging? You know, everything felt right. I felt like it was my own native ground that I was walking on and passing through. So the experiences just opened me up to many more layers in the world and possibilities, but also inside myself.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Did you feel that you knew this place, this land?

Beebe Bahrami: Yes. And going back to 1986, you know, I finished that semester nine years before I even got to walk the Camino de Santiago. I was journeying up to Paris to visit cousins, and just on the train as we were traversing those northern lands of Spain going through Nevada and Bass country and then into Accutane in southwestern France, I felt this uncanny, energetic pull; and it was an overnight train, and I couldn't sleep. So I just stood at the window and gazed out the window and vowed that I would go back. And I did. It took a while, but I did, and that feeling was still there. It's like nothing I've ever felt before, and it doesn't go away. I was told that if you accept this invitation, there will be much to learn. And it's encoded inside you as well. Anyone could say that, but we all find our own place. You know, we navigate our inner and outer map as is most appropriate to us. And this was mine.

Sandie Sedgbeer: I first heard about the Camino when I read Shirley McClain's Book. And it just felt like the most magical place to me. It drew me. Since then, as I mentioned in the intro, I have interviewed many people who've written books about the Camino, books about their own experiences, and movies about the Camino. And even the guy who writes the Camino Guides, John Briley, I've interviewed him as well, but I've read a book quite like yours. Yours, you know, I mean, apart from the fact that it is so beautifully written, incredible descriptions, it does read a little bit like some kind of a detective story as well as a Dan Brown thriller. It's got so many elements in it. But, still, yours goes deeper into that spiritual journey than anybody I've ever read. You went back three times, didn't you?

Beebe Bahrami: I've gone back many more times than that. But for this particular topic, this mystery, it was three devoted conscious pilgrimages before I started the First Goose pilgrimage. Though I had been on the Camino many times before, I have now since several times after. But it was when I really realized this goose symbolism keeps coming up. And every time I'm on the Camino, it comes up in different forms and variations through people, through stone carvings, through an inlaid board game in, Lograno in on the Camino de Santiago, the Camino Francis, that's, uh, called The Game of the Goose and is also considered a metaphor for the Camino and for life. And it kept coming up, and I thought, I need to do something organized and start going on a pilgrimage that's devoted to looking for the goose signs and noting them all down.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So, tell us the story about the Goose then. Why the Goose?

Beebe Bahrami: Why the Goose? That was the first time I really heard of it. Well, first of all, as an anthropologist, I was already familiar with Camino literature, even before I had stepped on it. I wanted to read about historical tales, and I came upon some books in Spanish and in French that were more esoteric. They were speaking about some pilgrims walking on a spiritual initiatory path. And they would follow signs that were maybe not as evident. We follow scallop shells, we follow arrows, but these pilgrims were also following the footprint of the Goose. So, when I first read that, I thought, Hmm, what? And then, I met some pilgrims on the Camino when I was walking it, mostly from Spain and France, who also said they were on this initiatory spiritual path. They were following signs, and one of them was the footprint of the Goose.

And that's when I just thought, this is really making no sense, and it's wacky, but it's wonderful, and I'm curious. And then when I encountered that board game, inlaid in the square, in Lograno, the capital of the province of La Rioja, about a third of the way along the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. This is a board game that has 63 squares. It's like a labyrinth or a shimming serpent going back and forth to a winning square, the 63rd square on those 63 squares. 13 of them are geese. So they're geese squares, and they're lucky squares.

And the parish priest whose idea is really behind this board game being inlaid on this plaza that is right on the Camino, as you walk through Logano, his whole idea was to say, wake up pilgrims. And anyone who passes by the board game to the fact that we are on a spiritual journey in life.

And the Camino is a metaphor for life. And the game of the Goose is a metaphor for the Camino and for life. And that geese are indeed lucky. They are ancient messengers that have spoken between mortals in the divine, and they are guides and guardians. So look for the goose square as you walk.

And that's when I really started saying, I need to pay more attention to this. And I dug more deeply, and I started finding that there is a rich, huge, vast, diverse body of lore from across Eurasia. But I was really focusing on European traditions that involve the Goose and the goddess. And, oftentimes, if the goddess isn't pictured with the Goose, and the Goose is very explicitly one of her messenger animals or one of her guardian animals, like Juno and the geese, who guard her temple, they appear with goose or duck feet, you know?

So they become these hybrid divinities embodying the qualities of the Goose. And I kept finding these web-footed goddesses. And then, on the Camino, I found one who is now Mary, who had all of the characteristics of the ancient goddesses, such as showing up at holy streams or cave openings. She might be combing her hair or spinning flax or wool thread. And very often, her feet are in the water, and if you look in, they have goose or ducky feet. I realize there's a synchronism happening between the ancient pre-Christian and the Christian female divinities. And, the lore just kept, kept building and building. And I realized that there's this whole folkloric collection of traditions, including our mother goose tales of my mother, the Goose. Why would Charles Perrault in 1695 call these folk tales that he had gathered the stories of Mother Goose or my mother, the Goose, because there was some precedent that there was this guide and guardian, this divine guide and guardian who was the teacher and protector of earth stories?

And when you really look into the Mother Goose stories, they are earth wisdom tales. It was a safe way for the feminine divine to survive.

Now centuries after Christianity, with a very patriarchal flavor of a male elite, essentially determined the sacred traditions to survive in a safe way. And then I started seeing these images engraved in medieval churches in the stones, especially the Romanesque of the 11th and 12th centuries. And, you know, realized that the Masons were also playing with all these different symbols and folklore traditions in keeping them in play, even as official versions of Christianity were gaining greater and greater dominance.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So what about, tell me about the parallel universes, which is kind of mentioned in the press releases about your Book, a kind of parallel universe to the Christian Camino de Santiago.

Beebe Bahrami: Right, right. You know, nothing comes into play from a vacuum. Yeah, so Christianity took root in Europe, overlaying itself on prior traditions. And I mean, almost all the chapels you find from the Middle Ages were already recognized as holy places before a chapel was built there. There Might have been a holy stream or a cave. And the Camino is especially full of these places, and almost all these chapels are devoted to Mary.

She is the first and foremost personality that they're devoted to. And they all have these very beautiful nature-based origin stories. Like, there's our Lady of Najera, also in La Rioja, she was discovered in a cave. A King, Garcia, I forget, which is it…The third was out hunting, around 1044 AD. And his falcon took off after a dove and suddenly disappeared in a thicket of trees against this red stone wall, a cliff. And the king parted the trees, went in, and saw a cave. And as he went into the cave, he smelled lilies and saw the light. As he arrived at the back of the cave, there was the falcon in the dove, seated peaceably on either side of a beautiful image of mother Mary with Lilies at her feet.

And this light just coming from Inside, and now there's a candle, but there's this divine light emitting from the cave. There's another story in Leboreiro. This is Galicia of a chapel also devoted to Santa Maria, to Mary. And the story goes that villagers, sometime probably in the 12th century, they'd actually just built their church. And they, this beautiful spring, suddenly emerged and started flowing with water, and they could smell the perfume from it by day and see the light coming out of it by night.

So it was just this, this, this beautiful layering, you know, of these prior sacred systems that were finding a way to, to continue to fold into the next narrative. People only until very recently, we were all living directly from the earth. We had a knowledge of the earth; we grew our food, we herded, we hunted, and we gathered. And when you're in that deep of a relationship with your very livelihood, you are very sensitive to it. You are also to the point where people would make offerings at certain springs or meadows just to assure the crops' or the animals' health. And it's really only something that we've recently kind of lost. We've been separated from, and even more so when we have visualized a divinity that is somewhere up there or out there but not here, rooted in the earth.

And all of these stories, all these prior spiritualities, we're saying is we still need to be rooted in the earth, and the earth is still sacred. She can be, at times, represented by Mary, and she can also be represented by these hybrid female divinities who often have bird feet. And the duck feet and the goose feet are really significant, too, because these starts going into shamanic realms. Where animals can navigate both the underworld, this world, and the upper world. The geese and ducks can dive in the water, lay their eggs on the earth, and they can fly magnificently to the point where geese are the first migratory animals, birds to say, spring is here, or, you know, autumn is here. And they start moving long before other birds are willing to take that risk.

Sandie Sedgbeer: There are lots of stories, obviously, and stories of stories. Engravings depictions are something else. I mean, what was the oldest depiction of the Geese that you come across?

Beebe Bahrami: A really old one. There is a waterfowl ivory engraving. I believe its origination goes back about 30,000 years to the earliest, really, to the earliest mobile art, the earliest human art and some of the earliest human art. But so 30,000 years ago, somebody thought, this creature's important enough to invest in engraving into ivory.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Interesting. So, you said you'd been to the Camino before learning about the geese. So at what point did the geese come into the story then for you?

Beebe Bahrami: I spent a lot of time on several routes of the Camino, especially the Camino Frances (The French Way), the most famous route; that goes across northern Spain, but also the other route across northern Spain, the Camino del Norte. And that's the one that traverses the Atlantic coastline of Iberia. That's where I started really hearing these stories of these bird-footed divinities. So it was already on my radar that this is so interesting. And the literature, the anthropological literature, and the historical literature speak as we have from Strabo (2) from over 2000 years ago; he wrote about the northern peoples of Iberia as the Romans were making inroads and said: these are going to be the harder people to assimilate into the empire, into the Roman world because their women govern, their women inherit their women.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So, how did that understanding change your experience walking the Camino?

Beebe Bahrami: It made me, first and foremost, and maybe this is why it's so effective as an initiatory journey.

It made me pay much more attention to everything. It became the best method for a walking meditation I think I've ever stumbled upon. And I am one of those people who, when I walk, I'm better as a meditator. Because sitting down and meditating, I don't. I don't find that present time so readily as walking and letting my footprint and footstep be like prayer beads, setting a cadence and falling into the present. And paying attention to the signs and looking for the Goose and her footprints made me so present and aware of my environment and the bottom of my feet that my connection to the earth and the interior states.

It was a level of presence I had never achieved before. And I think that's where I started realizing the power of what was happening here. But even at the beginning, I really was approaching this in this very intellectual way of the anthropologist just following the material and seeing where the material leads, looking for all the sources and the evidence. And I didn't really expect it to start working on me. And then I just found myself. It was already working on me when I realized, oh my goodness, I think I'm one of the initiates on this path as well. And I absolutely loved it because it had magic to it. A very real, real magic synchronicity that happens when you are that present and paying attention. You are open.

Sandie Sedgbeer: When you had to go home in between those trips, was that pretty hard going for you? I mean, it's like, you're on the threshold of this incredible discovery or quest, and suddenly you've gotta leave it, and now it's all in your head.

Beebe Bahrami: It is a relief because it's intense being on the Camino and tracing a mystery like this. But, in a way, it never ended. Because going home just gave me time to digest the experiences and reflect on what was going on. Oftentimes, well, not, I say every time it's really true.

It is good for pilgrims to know that the Camino doesn't end when they arrive at their holy destination. In this case, in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, the Camino doesn't end.

That's the middle of the Camino. And then, just like a medieval pilgrim, you have to walk home. And half of the journey remains. And for us now, we fly home, take the bus, or boat home. It's a faster journey, but it still takes the same amount of time, if not more time, to process the journey to Santiago de Compostela and, and gain its lessons.

I'm still learning lessons from the very first Camino I ever took and all the other ones after it. And there's still more there. So it's, um, it's, it's in a sense, I never left the Camino. I haven't left the Camino yet. And especially in the pursuit of the Goose, it was always on my mind.

Sandie Sedgbeer: What would you say is the most important thing that has come out of your journeys on the Camino and your adventures with the geese?

Beebe Bahrami: Everything really is interconnected, and we need to return to our reverence of the earth and take care of her. And that includes each other and all the creatures on the earth. And that there is an incredible bigheartedness in so many people. And the experience of the Camino, it's a big-heartedness, and it's also a beautiful kind of real, real magic that takes place once you step to set foot on the Camino.

You trust stepping into the unknown, and you open your awareness to just the very present.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You experienced some amazing synchronicities on those journeys. Would you say that maybe no more than usual, you were more aware of the synchronicity, or do you think some kind of magic was going on? I mean, it's on a lay line. The whole trail is supposed to be; I think it's on lay lines.

Beebe Bahrami: My experience is yes, it, it's definitely on a lay line, uh, it is a sort of supercharged, synchronistic place.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Do you feel super empowered?

Beebe Bahrami: I do only because I learned by walking it how much everything I need is delivered, even in ways that I could have never imagined, and I really emphasized the need, not want what I needed to be delivered, you know? So there, there's this kind of honesty, and making one honest as well of the Camino. But there's definitely something powerful and supercharged going on there. And I think a part of it is because we humans have chosen this landscape based on certain innate features pulling us at our charge to walk it. And so we're adding to that. We're adding that extra resonance to it that makes it supercharged. It's a place that also says it's you. You are invited here to walk in a way you haven't walked anywhere else back home. And I think that's a part of it as well. Why do the synchronicities seem to be so profound?

But by walking it, I've also learned, especially walking it several times. Then I discovered, wow, this synchronicity in these coincidences. They keep happening in ways I couldn't have orchestrated or made up. And so, having that experience now at home, I tell myself, pay attention! Because there is synchronicity all around us, but you must notice it. You have to see the openings that are coming at you.

Sandie Sedgbeer: When you were making those three trips and didn't know that you were going to, I imagine, turn that into a book, each of those trips was pivotal to this particular Book.

Were you recording your impressions and experiences? Were you writing them down, taking notes, the whole time?

Beebe Bahrami: I was on every one of those pilgrimages. I kept a notebook, and in my training as a writer and anthropologist, I called them my field notes. I was noting everything down, including, you know, at night. I would definitely do the full download of notes in my journal. But by day, I had just a little journalist's notebook that you flip open and it can fit in your pocket. And I had that in my pant pocket, with a pen ready to just flip open and jot something down. So I was, and now, with the advent of digital photography, that 2012 trip was, you, wonderful because it was the first time I really took a digital camera on the trail with me.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Do you not want to move there to leave America and go and live in France or Spain?

Beebe Bahrami: I do, I do. I'd love to have a foothold here and a foothold there, which is what I'm doing right now. But at some point, I'd really like to have my main base be probably Southwestern France. Then I'll be ever ready to get on the Camino and cross the Pyrenees and walk across Northern Spain.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You made a wonderful friend when you stayed in France.And there a little town or village that you are particularly fond of, and she was like a mentor to you, a wise elder. Is she still with us?

Beebe Bahrami: She is. Thank you for asking about her. Her name is Bernadette. She just turned 89 and is in sarlat, my home base, when I'm in Europe. So I will go there, and I always touch in with her first. And she really is like the wise woman met at the fork in the road, who has words of guidance and advice. I mean, she is a goose in that sense.

The Guide and Guardian and each of my pilgrimages is held by her. It's framed in the beginning and in the end. And she always would want to send me off with words of wisdom. And then, when I'd come back after El Camino and go to Sarlat, she'd want to sit down with me and get the full download and then have something uncanny that would fully unlock the whole mystery of what that walk had been about.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Have you found that any other routes also feature the Goose?

Beebe Bahrami: Yeah, I think there is because following the folklore trail, Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology wrote about the Goose footed goddess. And he said there's a goosefooted goddess across Europe. You know, there's one in Scandinavia, one in Southern Germany, one in Southern France that there are all these beings, in across northern Spain. And I think that anyone walking any of the Camino routes, like the Jacobs Way (Jakobswege) in Germany or the Saint Jacques way (* )in France, would find them,

Sandie Sedgbeer: You know, there is a walk-in trail in Victoria, BC, British Colombia, and I used to walk it a lot, and it's called the Goose. And everybody calls it, I don't know if they call it the galloping Goose, but it's known as the Goose. So, we are walking the Goose. And I used to walk it every day when I lived there. And, it never even occurred to me, I hadn't read your Book, that there may be some other significance to that name.

Beebe Bahrami: Oh my goodness. Since you've walked it now, you can reflect on it and see what comes up for you. This your Goose walk ... Yes. And I'm going to look into that. That's exciting. Sandie Sedgbeer: Yeah. So, before we close, tell us about your two blogs. You've got Cafe OC and the Pilgrim's Way Cafe.

Beebe Bahrami: Yes, Cafe OC is really about life in southwestern France. And the Pilgrim's Way Cafe is about seeing life from the cadence of the feet, of footsteps, and, um, you know, very much about the pilgrim life, but also about exploring the world by walking.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Does it get harder each time you go, I mean, you know, with age or to walk the Camino?

Beebe Bahrami: To walk? No, it presents challenges and gifts, always in a different combination. So it's the same hard and wonderful, but different each time because I'm meeting different people. Yeah. This time I would say the challenge was I was walking during probably one of the busiest times of the year, after the pause of the pandemic had ceased. Everyone wanted to be out there and travel, and they had bucket lists. And there were so many people, and there was a point where it was almost overwhelming as much as I was just so happy that the life on the Camino was back, especially the people who live from the Camino and Yeah. It's very much a cottage industry for them, so. Yeah.

The way of the Wild Goose three pilgrimages following geese, stars, and hunches on the Camino de Santiago by Beebe Bahrami is published by Monkfish Book Publishing and available wherever good books, especially travel books, are sold. For more information about Beebe Bahrami, visit. Beebe Bahrami.weebley.com

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