There is nothing Oriental either in the hymn or in the music of the dance which follows it; all is sweet, tender, and reverent as a religious ceremony performed by children in a church should be. But at the close of each couplet we are suddenly reminded of the East by the rattle of castanets held all this time hidden in the palms of the boys’ hands, and now played by them with a mastery of crescendo and diminuendo, that shows how the castanets may be made instruments of music, not merely of rhythmical noise. Here strikes the note of tradition once again, for the castanets are Oriental and must have been introduced into the Cathedral service, like the dance itself, by the Arabicised Christians of Seville under Islam.
The hymn has two verses and the dance is gone through twice; then the ten little boys run lightly up the steps, five on either side of the altar, make their reverence to the Elements shut away from sight in the golden pyx above the image of “Mary most pure”—a fine sculpture in wood by Martinez Montañes—and disappear into the sacristy at the back of that wealth of silver and brocade provided by the long-forgotten Don Gonzalo. But before the music of the Benediction begins half the congregation seated in the transept rise and hastily make their way to the Door of the Poles under the Giralda tower, for that is the way the Cardinal goes out to his palace across the square, and the pious Sevillians think an especial blessing will be their portion if they can intercept his passage and kiss his beautiful amethyst ring as he leaves the Cathedral after the Dance of the Seises in the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady.
The next time the boys dance is during the three days of Carnival, and if we ask why this very secular occasion be chosen, the archives of the Chapter give us the explanation.
In 1682 there died in Seville one Don Francisco de Contreras de Chaves, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Gentleman of the King, Familiar of the Holy Order of the Inquisition, and one of the _Veintecuatros_ (twenty-four), an order of nobility granted to Seville and Seville alone, in the thirteenth century. This distinguished individual was distressed at the vain and worldly amusements indulged in during the _Carnestolendas_ (the Latin _carnis tollendus_), which are the three days in which meat is eaten in preparation for the forty of abstinence beginning with Ash Wednesday; and he fondly hoped that by introducing the Dance of the Seises into the Cathedral services of those three days, the tide of profane entertainment might be stemmed. So he willed that after his wife’s death all his “large fortune” should be bestowed on “the triduum of Carnestolendas” in order that these days should be celebrated in the Cathedral with as much pomp and magnificence as the Conception and Corpus Christi.