Spirituality has once again been placed in pop culture; This is largely due to the latest album of the famous Catalan singer Rosalía, entitled Lux. Opinion columns and analytical texts on various platforms have sparked interesting debates on the function of religious allusions in a West which had presented itself as an almost totally secularized world, a world where religion already seemed proscribed, European lefts who thought themselves anticlerical although religion had found refuge in the discourse of an increasingly strengthened extreme right. Some approaches to what a disk looks like Lux and the discursive packaging with which it is presented did not fail to mention that Rosalía comes from a country that still suffers from the consequences of a dictatorship that promoted national-Catholicism as its main ideology.
This text will not be a contribution to these debates; it suffices to say, in this regard, that the religiosity that I saw debated regarding the launch of Lux It focused above all on institutionalized spiritualities, mainly in the great religions which have exercised state functions throughout history. They are the ones who Lux It refers in a more important way although it tries to focus on the more mystical and less mundane part and although it includes other religious traditions from China or Japan; The debate focused above all on the great religions and in particular on the Catholic religion, to which the cover makes a striking allusion. These analyzes of spirituality do not include, as might be expected, the diversity of systems of creation of the sacred or other non-hegemonic systems when discussing it. This is not a criticism, it is understood that this is the case given the cultural context of the main creator of LuxI just wanted to remind you that there is much more to the sacred world than religions and spirituality.
What I want to address here are rather some thoughts related to the linguistic aspects of the launch of Lux as a pretext. We know that in Lux more than ten languages are used; From the Indo-European linguistic family we find ancient Latin and late (more precisely 21st century) versions of Latin, such as Catalan (Rosalia’s mother tongue), Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese; There are other Indo-European languages such as English, Ukrainian and German as well as Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew; From the East, Mandarin and Japanese were included. It is therefore an album which includes above all Western Indo-European languages.
The religious, the linguistic and the political have been inextricably linked, consider the languages chosen to create sacred texts and the debates to reform them to the religious interpretation of linguistic diversity. The story of the Tower of Babel tells of the existence of linguistic diversity as a punishment for human audacity unlike what we find in the New Testament where the Holy Spirit descends in the form of tongues of fire on the apostles who begin to speak in multiple languages to proclaim the wonders of God. The enormous political consequences of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation are linked to the translation of the Bible into Low German when the papal authority reserved the interpretation of biblical texts only for specialists, thus preventing their translation into vernacular languages. Another split took place regarding linguistics, the Second Vatican Council opened the possibility of celebrating mass in various languages and stopping it in Latin, which generated protests and linguistic rebellions. For many Islamic women’s movements, access to the language in which the Quran is written is an important part of their struggle to participate in the interpretation of the sacred texts.
In this region that some call Latin America, the translation of catechisms and Catholic doctrines into indigenous languages was a fundamental instrument of religious imposition during colonization. In Mexico, from the 1930s, the Ministry of Public Instruction entrusted the literacy of the indigenous-speaking population to a Protestant Presbyterian association, the Summer Linguistic Institute; one of its aims was the translation of the New Testament and other religious documents; All this has had worrying consequences on the organization of indigenous communities. Translation of magazine texts into native languages Watchtowerthe main periodical publication of Jehovah’s Witnesses, also seems more than worrying to me. There is an ever-complex conflict between religion, politics, colonization, the anti-patriarchal and emancipatory struggle which is reflected in the choice of languages.
The first versions of the gospels I was exposed to as a child were written in peninsular Spanish, notably in Madrid. Whether through readings or religious films, I quickly understood that the Catholic world had a particular accent and used particular pronouns and conjugations; Even today, when I hear Spanish spoken in Madrid, I have to make an effort not to have the impression that I am being spoken to about something religious; When a Madrilenian speaks to me, I feel, at least in the first seconds, that it is the voice of the Gospel speaking to me. In Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s popular town hall, a very famous representation of the Passion of Christ is celebrated year after year. The first time I went there, I was shocked to hear the person playing Jesus, with a wonderful popular Chileango accent, utter the following phrase: “What I say to you, I say to everyone: look.” Also for the imagination of the working-class neighborhoods of Mexico, the Bible speaks of Madrid.
The oscillations between religion, politics and linguistics were further strengthened with the launch of Lux. The magnificent children’s choir of the Choir of the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Montserrat participates in the album, an important element in the identity history of Catalonia; The fact that the choir sings in Spanish and not Catalan has sparked controversy and lament, given concern over the decline in the social use of Catalan. The complex relationship between Catalan, Spanish, their variants, the anti-racist movement and migration has landed once again in a linguistic question in the album of an artist who has tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to escape secular discussions and take refuge, aseptically, in the world of the mystical, perhaps to avoid taking a political stance on many serious world issues.
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