We, the Torn Cloak Pilgrims, decided early on we weren’t doing a mundane a journo piece on the history of the holy places we visited, and instead focus on the esoteric. In this way the dull flesh of antiquity is replaced with the living presence in the reliquary.

Vienna

I descended the clean, new steps of St Stephen’s Cathedral crypt, into a damp, whitewashed basement reminiscent of most modern churches, allowing the huddled crowd to move ahead into the strange shelves where the viscera of the Holy Roman Emperors sits in eternal storage awaiting the Resurrection. Flanking the porch are two howling demon hounds, the guardians of the underworld, where the restless dead shuffle about, much like the tour guide, in an ambling purgatory of repetition, in the tomb of the Grail Kings.

A few steps and the white walls of colourless concrete were replaced with the filthy unworked stone and dusty floors of the unaltered crypt. A hole in the ground, with a ladder sinking through chicken wire mesh, a single morbidly glowing torch resting on the heaped bones of plague victims scattered among the rat shit; two porticos cut into the rock, thigh bones and skulls stacked in neat rows in the ossuary, I wondered what the ghosts in that small cupboard think as they look at the constantly changing butterfly wing faces at the prison doors, half a millennia passes in tourist’s glares and only the strange change of their accents tells you time has passed.

The next day.

The palace of the Hapsburg emperors, claimants to the thrones of nearly all of Europe, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Grail Kings, for better or worse, depicted staring out of a celestial window, admiring the Holy City over the river of death, Charon pushing his boat like a Venetian taxi driver, carrying the unbaptised to their gloomy corridor whilst the heron is throttled by the eagle. You’ll know the painting if you’ve seen it.

The Crown and Sword of Charlemagne, the fragment of the True Cross, the Lance of Longinus; we prayed here for some time, not prayers of the faithful for protection of the dearly departed, or the prayers of the sick for healing from wound or worry, but the silent staring prayer of dark thoughts, the Theology with Fists as we are slowly understanding it.

The Opus Dei church of St Peterskirche over the road; the altar shrine of St Escriva in the candlelit murmur of a hundred pilgrims waiting for Latin Mass; old women with shaking hands handing out leaflets to baffled guests trying to swallow the thousand year old pill of immortal Catholicism that sticks in the throats of all but the confessed sinner. How can one stand in the presence of martyrs adorned with jewels and wrapped in linen with amethyst eyeballs and not think, there is a mystery here the modern world has no answer for.

We prayed here for some small moments, sharing snatched glances with confused peasants across the centuries, serenaded by the clumsy tinkle of pennies into rusty iron boxes for the poor. All around us the shields and spears of ancient Europe were raised in murderous accord toward the enemy at the walls whilst monks and nuns held the fort in prayer and fasting. The doctrines of the barbarian do not belong here in the Roman Church, they deserve the woods and the mud and the moss, naked and stupid and drooling with the animals. Western Civilisation is the work of the religious man, everything else is a folly of morons who would have been vagrants a thousand years ago.

Canterbury

Ten miles of peregrination began in the frigid silence of a chapel in rural Kent; a poorly constructed satchel carrying little more than a bed to sleep in and some fish for the sundown fast; towards the Black Prince’s well, where the man who would have been king before Richard the Lionheart was temporarily cured of the same ailments that would later claim his life. We washed hands and tongues and eyes and thoughts in the crystal water, the air damp, the locals shuffling by, the sick still treated on the hill behind the church, a thousand years and they still drag their fleeting carcasses to the healing waters, if only in memory.

We had seen shadows of the future in the tunnels below, on the long slope bridle paths skirting the city, one of those beautiful flashes where the concrete massiveness of a dual carriageway underpass, littered with the detritus of underage drunks, suddenly juxtaposes with a century old cider farm and the storm drain run off, rural and urban clash and tradition and modern rub against each other like tectonic plates, the friction thundering just under the surface. In a certain air I value those moments more than a baroque altar.

We entered the Leper’s graveyard, slid down the hill towards the Wagon & Horses and ate pork and drank ale; what century was it? Could the blonde waif behind the bar say with certainty that it was the 21st century, pressing the logs onto the fire and feeding pig and pint to two wanderers?

We slept next to the four century grave of a Mr Finn, he woke in the cemetery fog of my dreams, tried to swap places with me, lying on my roll mat whilst he told me I’d been sleeping in the grave, not him, and it was his turn to wake up and have a life again. Maybe he wanted to go for a drink with the barmaid he’d watched walk by his coffin since her great grandmother was a girl.

We woke to the patter of rain and packed for the road.

A half a dozen more churches on the old way into Canterbury and the site of Beckett’s murder; the Cathedral closed for Christmas services; matins with the handful of confused looking middle aged evangelicals who couldn’t muster the energy to speak the words of the Lord’s Prayer with enthusiasm let alone erect a temple to last out two millennia of religious wars.

We were allowed into Beckett’s shrine, I sat on the steps whilst my companion prayed the rosary to the awkward soundtrack of an awful organist practicing before the Sunday services began. The Canterbury university toff girls shepherded the route in and out of the shrine, those strange Edwardian ghosts that know they are better than you because their ovaries contain future officers and professors.

We trudged back on the long pilgrim road to Rome, flanking the new consumer road to nowhere; ours was peppered with dog walkers and cider farms, theirs with service stations and roundabouts. We finished in the church we started in, the only physical sign we’d been on the pilgrimage the badges purchased from the Cathedral shop, a tin replica of a 15th century trinket depicting Beckett sans head on the altar. It was a scandal at the time and influenced English and European cultural history and the flow of saints and solders to Jerusalem for five hundred years; maybe that’s what we carry with us when we walk the old ways, because we’re not walking alone on this earthly exile, we’re following our forefathers to the White City.