Here is a story about the origin of the Camino de Santiago or Way of Saint James, the great pilgrimage trail to the city of Santiago de Compostela:

Twelve hundred years ago, a hermit named Pelayo heard music and saw a light in the woods, in the misty, ocean-lapped northwestern tip of what we now call Spain. On investigating, he found bones and old parchment in a cave. A local bishop, Theodomir, was summoned. He promptly identified the bones as the earthly remains of Santiago, or St. James the Major, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus Christ.

Beheaded in Jerusalem in 22 A.D., James floated all the way to Hispania in a rudderless boat guided by angels, the story goes. The bifurcated apostle was accompanied by his own disciples. It was not their first visit; supposedly they had first preached there after Jesus died, with unsatisfactory results. Now they were coming back to finish the job.

This time they landed at the inland port city of Padron in Galicia. In Padron, James was laid upon a rock that immediately reformed itself into a stone coffin. After various adventures involving, among other things, some wild bulls and a duplicitous queen, James was finally laid to rest at what would become Santiago de Compostela (“Saint James of the field of stars” is one popular and evocative translation, derived from the Latin campus stellae, or “starry field” – though it is disputed), some 23 kilometers away.

And there Saint James slumbered, forgotten, for 800 years.

The historical evidence for this tale is slight. James may or may not have ever visited the Iberian peninsula in his lifetime; if he did, contemporary sources do not mention it. Other narratives involving regional ambitions and the Reconquista or Reconquest – that slow, bloody process by which Spain-to-be* rid itself of its Islamic masters and became a Catholic nation – ring more true. In short, the north of Spain needed a Christian hero in those days, so it made one up.

And yet, for half a millennium and more there were few doubters. Pilgrims came from across Europe to worship at the shrine of Saint James. They came to be healed, to fulfill a vow, to be forgiven – and no doubt, too, for the sheer adventure of it all. James became the patron saint of Christian Iberia. His warrior side was, is, undeniable; he was said to appear sometimes in the clouds in the midst of battle, riding his white horse  and lopping off the heads of pagan soldiers Thus his  nickname: Matamoros – the Moor-slayer.

That, to the modern mind, or at least to this one, is the disturbing aspect of the cult of Saint James. It is only too apparent at his shrine. The massive baroque altarpiece at Santiago Cathedral is topped by the sword-wielding saint, while a smaller polychrome sculpture in a niche in one transept shows James on his rearing charger with a cluster of dead and dying infidels below. Between my first visit in 2001 and my latest in 2015, the Moors disappeared by artificial flowers – but I am tall, and can see above them. Those slaughtered Muslims are still there.

But that is not, thank goodness, the whole story. There is also a gentler side to this Spanish Santiago, or Saint James. He is often depicted as a pilgrim himself, with his staff, his wide-brimmed hat and his cockle shell – the last a universal symbol for the Camino, and ubiquitous along the Way, where it serves as both a road marker and, increasingly, a brand. For the pilgrimage has seen a huge resurgence in the 21st century, and the towns along the Way can smell the dough.

Old stories abound of Saint James miraculously appearing to help those headed for his shrine. In one of them, a pilgrim who stays behind to nurse a sick friend as his other companions trek onward is spirited away by Santiago on his flying horse after the friend dies; they reach the last hill along the Way, called Mountjoy, before the rest. The saint looked after his flock with a vengeance; those who cheated or harmed his faithful sometimes suffered terrible fates.

There is a third Saint James as well, and that is the one depicted on the Pórtico da Gloria, which is the Galician name for the Portal of Glory, at the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. This seated 12th-century James, sculpted magnificently in marble by Master Mateo or Matthew, the cathedral’s architect, is meditative. He looks both wise and weary, a little regretful, to my eyes, and profoundly human.

My favorite Santiago pilgrim, the West Virginia-born Georgiana Goddard King, who wrote three books about the Way a century ago, described Master Matthew’s Santiago as “worn and very beautiful, graver than mild, and deeper than serene. “His eyes look further than he has ever gone, but he sits quietly at last.”