Votive offerings and healing rites (Spain)

Votive offerings and healing rites (Spain)
c. 1785. Girl offered to the Reclining Christ for her healing after an accident, Palencia (Spain).

Votive offerings and healing rites (Spain)

Labour and infancy are the moments of the life cycle with the greatest risk of death, and the causes of such death have spawned the widest variety of protective objects since olden times in all cultures and at all times. The use of religious and lay amulets to protect childhood and women during delivery still persists in many sectors of the developed world, most typically, but not exclusively, in the rural world.

Although many of these votive offerings are kept in museums, some rural churches in Spain maintain and renew these naïve images of miraculously cured people painted on their walls. They are votive offerings of thanks at the saving of loved ones, and tend to have an explanatory text together with a picture of the beneficiary, usually in bed or at the moment of an accident. Children are very frequent.

Photo David Serrano Pascual