Every one knows that during Holy Week numerous Brotherhoods and Guilds pervade the streets of Seville and other Andalucian towns in procession, the original intention of which was to show images representing events in the Passion of Our Lord, in order to bring home to the illiterate people the tragedy of the Crucifixion. And every one who sees these processions in Seville remarks on the artistic merit of many of the images, the magnificent dresses, and the picturesque effects produced in the streets and in the Cathedral by the innumerable candles flickering round the platforms on which the images are borne.
These are the common-places of Holy Week in Seville. They catch the eye of every visitor who has the slightest knowledge of or feeling for art; but long before the week is out, those who come merely to see something new are sick to death of the eternal repetition of the same thing—the “Brothers” or the “Nazarenes” in their voluminous robes and tall peaked hoods, the brass bands, the Civil Guard, the first _paso_ draped with velvet or satin, and surrounded with silver candelabra and vases of flowers, with an image of Our Lord in the centre; more Brothers or Nazarenes, more music, more Civil Guards, and then the _paso_ of Our Lady, which closes every procession save some which were instituted before the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin became a dogma of the Roman Church.
When one has seen between twenty and thirty of the _pasos_, all creeping along at a snail’s pace, with a pause every few yards for the bearers to rest and the people to admire, one does begin to get a thought weary of certain features in them. But we who know Seville have learnt what to see and what to avoid, and we are careful not to exhaust ourselves physically and mentally by attempting to watch the slow progress of a dozen _pasos_ past the same point on the same day, for indeed the processions are but one feature in the manifold ceremonies of Holy Week, and if you set about it the right way you may vary your emotions almost every hour of the day.
Therefore I, who have often felt sorry to see my compatriots enduring the maximum of fatigue to see the minimum of what is most interesting in these curious survivals of the early Church, will try to indicate a few incidents in the long programme of ecclesiastical ceremonies which do not figure in the official account of what are incongruously described as _las fiestas de Semana santa_.