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From Christian religion to feminist spirituality: Mary Magdalene pilgrimages to
La Sainte-Baume, France
Anna Fedele
a
a
Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Online Publication Date: 01 November 2009
To cite this Article Fedele, Anna(2009)'From Christian religion to feminist spirituality: Mary Magdalene pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume,
France',Culture and Religion,10:3,243 261
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From Christian religion to feminist spirituality: Mary
Magdalene pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France
Anna Fedele*
Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, E

cole des Hautes E

tudes en Sciences Sociales,

Paris, France
In recent years, the pilgrimage shrine of La Sainte-Baume has attracted an
increasing number of non-Catholic pilgrims inuenced by the New Age
and the Neopagan movement. These pilgrims consider Mary Magdalene as a
sort of female counterpart of Jesus and the mountain of La Sainte-Baume,
where according to a Christian legend she spent the last part of her life, as a
power place charged with healing energy. Based on 3 years of eld work
among Mary Magdalene pilgrims and drawing on Tanya Luhrmanns idea of
interpretive drift (1989), the essay describes the way in which these
pilgrims gradually shift from their previous Christian background towards
what they generally identify as spirituality. The pilgrims reconceptualise La
Sainte-Baume and its saint, and make their own a shrine they feel was
misappropriated and unjustly monopolised by the Church.
Keywords: feminist spirituality; Neopaganism; Roman Catholicism; Mary
Magdalene; shrines; pilgrimage; Da Vinci Code
Introduction
Le massif de la Sainte-Baume, usually referred to as La Sainte-Baume, is a
mountain ridge in southeastern France situated approximately 30 km east from
Marseille; it owes its popularity to a cave (baumo in Provencal) where as the
legend has it, Mary Magdalene spent the last 30 years of her life.
1
An important
pilgrimage shrine in the Middle Ages, La Sainte-Baume is experiencing
increasing popularity and is visited by more and more international pilgrims who
do not identify themselves as practicing Catholics. Inuenced by the Neopagan
movement and particularly by the feminist spirituality movement,
2
these spiritual
travellers consider the power place of the Sainte-Baume as an ideal site to
connect with the energy of Mary Magdalene.
3
Between 2002 and 2005, I accompanied independent Spanish and Catalan
pilgrims as well as three organised pilgrimage groups on their Mary Magdalene
tours. All the alternative pilgrims I met included, in their itineraries, three
high-spots related to Mary Magdalene: Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,
ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14755610903279663
http://www.informaworld.com
*Email: annafedele@yahoo.com
Culture and Religion
Vol. 10, No. 3, November 2009, 243261
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Saint-Maximin-en-Provence and La Sainte-Baume. Apart from these Catholic
shrines related to the saints legendary stay in Gaul, Mary Magdalene pilgrims
visited other places in France they associated with the hidden part of the
Christian tradition that Magdalene has come to stand for. In this article, I will
refer in particular to my experiences with a group of Italians travelling in summer
2003 that well represents the general beliefs and attitudes of Mary Magdalene
pilgrims.
On all the pilgrimages in which I took part, La Sainte-Baume emerged as a
realm of competing discourses (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 5) particularly apt to
foster among the pilgrims a passage from the Christian (mostly Catholic) religion
of their past towards what the pilgrims dened as spirituality. With their
spirituality, the pilgrims managed to integrate Christian elements into a corpus
of beliefs derived from Neopaganism and also from the so-called New Age.
4
Religious historians and anthropologists have highlighted a tendency in
contemporary Western religiosity (Hanegraaff 1996, 1999; Heelas 2002) to
turn away from established (mostly Christian) religions and towards spiritualities
that appear to their followers as less constricting and also less tied to structures of
authority and power (Knibbe 2010). Mary Magdalene pilgrimages conrm this
tendency and offer a privileged view on how Christian elements are melded into
these alternative spiritualities. Drawing on Luhrmanns (1989, 312) idea of an
interpretive drift by which Londoners practising witchcraft acquired gradually a
new way of interpreting things, I will analyse the pilgrims progressive
reinterpretation of Christian elements during their visit to La Sainte-Baume as an
example of their progressive passage from the Christian religion of their past to a
spirituality that enables them to interpret Christianity according to new patterns.
5
According to Jacobus de Voragines Golden legend (c.1260), Mary
Magdalene arrived to Gaul shortly after the crucixion together with other
Christians, among them Maximin, Lazarus, Martha and the two Marys, Maria
Jacobe and Maria Salome. They allegedly set out on an open boat without oars or
sails following the persecution of Christians in the Holy Land. The group of
Jesus followers miraculously reached a place that would thereafter take the name
of the Holy Marys of the Sea, or Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. After preaching
in Marseille and converting with the help of the other Christians the inhabitants of
what is now Provence, Mary Magdalene retired to a cave that was later identied
as the cave of La Sainte-Baume.
6
Situated on a spot where the dark green forest
meets the white rock of the mountain, the cave is barely visible from distance but
one can see the Dominican convent built directly into the rock surrounding its
entrance. Here, Mary Magdalene is believed to have lived for 30 years in
contemplation, without eating nor drinking, being lifted up to the heaven by
angels seven times a day. A church has been built into the cave, and at the top of
the mountain, where legend has it, angels picked up Mary Magdalene, there is a
little chapel called Saint-Pilon.
Mary Magdalene has been a controversial saint right from the start of
Christianity, and for centuries Christians have made their own Magdalene
A. Fedele 244
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(Maisch 1996). According to the four canonical gospels, after Jesus cast seven
demons out of her, she became one of his disciples and stayed at his side at the
cross. Mary Magdalene was then the rst person to see the resurrected Christ and
to announce this to the other disciples; these gospels give no information about
her age, her physical attributes or her association with a male gure. From the
rst centuries onwards, Christian authors confused her with other female gures
of the gospels, and in the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great declared (591)
that Mary Magdalene was one and the same as Lukes sinner (Luke 7:3738) and
Mary of Bethany (John 11:12 and 12:13) both of whom anointed Jesus at
different moments. In this way, Mary Magdalene became the sinful sister to
Martha and Lazarus and the repentant prostitute healed and saved by Jesus
intervention. Only in 1969, with the reform of the Sanctorale, was Gregory the
Greats confusion ofcially rejected by the Vatican. Most Catholics, lay and
clergy, continue to consider and revere Mary Magdalene as the prototype of the
repentant sinner.
The idea that Magdalene might have been the companion,
7
and even the
legitimate wife, of Jesus gained increasing popularity in the 1980s thanks to the
English bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Baigent et al.
(1982/1996).
8
Inuenced by De Se`de (1967), Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln say in
their book that the Grail is not a chalice, but the body of Mary Magdalene, which
once contained the Sangraal or Sang real (royal blood) of the descendants of
Christ. After 1982, a number of books appeared whose authors took the theory of
the Sangraal (or parts of it) for granted and focused on the gure of Mary
Magdalene (Starbird 1993, 1998; Picknett 2003).
9
Some of these authors
described their own journeys to places on the route of Mary Magdalene
(Starbird 1998; Kenyon and Sion 2002) and their spiritual experiences at various
sites. The international bestseller The Da Vinci code by Brown (2003) the
American novelist gave the Sangraal theory worldwide resonance and brought
Mary Magdalene again to the spotlight. But already pilgrims had been travelling
on their own or in organised groups to make contact with the energy of Mary
Magdalene in the sacred places of France well before The Da Vinci code,
probably since the early 1980s.
10
Every year, Catholic pilgrims, mostly French, visit La Sainte-Baume, which
is also a favourite area for weekend family excursions or hiking. As in other
pilgrimage shrines in Europe (Crain 1996; Coleman and Elsner 1998; Frey 2005;
Weibel 2005), it is difcult to establish whether the people entering the cave are
practicing Catholic pilgrims motivated by their faith, foreign tourists, curious
local wanderers raised as Catholics but motivated mainly by a tourist-like
curiosity or a mix of all these categories.
Pilgrims who want to spend the night at La Sainte-Baume can sleep at the
Hotellerie de La Sainte-Baume, a large building with a chapel situated on an
esplanade at the foot of the mountain near the small village of Le Plan dAups.
This inexpensive and quiet hostel is run by Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Together with the Dominican friars living in the small convent near the cave,
Culture and Religion 245
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these nuns help to organise the main religious processions held to celebrate
important Catholic feasts such as the Pentecost or the 22nd of July, the feast of
saint Mary Magdalene. Even if most of the remains of the saint are conserved in
the nearby basilica of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence,
11
some of her relics are also
enshrined in the cave and solemnly exposed on her feast day.
La Sainte-Baume is considered a magical place in French popular tradition,
and this makes it difcult to establish when the alternative, non-Catholic
pilgrimages began. According to French Catholic pilgrims coming from the area
of Marseille, by the 1970s and 1980s, meditation groups and Hare Krishna
disciples had settled in the area. The beauty of the landscape, the biodiversity of
the wood and the particular geomorphic conguration of La Sainte-Baume may
well have attracted other non-Catholic spiritual travellers in the past.
Neopaganism, feminist spirituality and alternative pilgrimages
Most of the Mary Magdalene pilgrims I accompanied had Catholic backgrounds.
But they had generally abandoned the religious concepts received from their
parents and embraced Neopagan beliefs. I use here Neopaganism as an umbrella
term for a variety of religions that draw inspiration from elements of
pre-Christian polytheistic worship (Magliocco 2001, 1). This denition allows
the inclusion of movements such as feminist spirituality, neoshamanism and the
Goddess movement, all sharing a concern about ecology and the protection of
Mother Earth and claiming roots in ancient pagan religions practiced by
European or American ancestors.
Like their fellow Neopagans, the pilgrims criticised Christianity and
particularly Catholicism (both generally referred to as the Church) for being
androcentric and exclusive and therefore partly responsible for the domination of
women throughout the centuries and the exploitation of Mother Earth. They
considered body and sexuality as sacred and wrongly stigmatised as impure and
sinful by the Church.
Like feminist spiritualists described by Cynthia Eller, Mary Magdalene
pilgrims considered the Goddess as the main divinity; they believed in the
importance of emphasising the centrality of women and of female divinities that
had been negated by patriarchy and used the feminine or gender as a primary
mode of religious analysis (Eller 1993, 6). Like neoshamans, the pilgrims
I accompanied referred their rituals to ancient and contemporary shamanic
traditions of American indigenous cultures but they also claimed continuity with
a secret lineage of European witches, priests and priestesses who had allegedly
preserved pre-Christian religious practices. Magdalene pilgrims also considered
as their forerunners the Knights Templar or the Cathars; both groups, they
believed, had been persecuted by the Church as heretics because they secretly
venerated the Goddess and knew about the true identity of Mary Magdalene.
Since the 1970s, individual or group spiritual travellers from Europe and the
USA have come to sacred places or places of power in order to meditate
A. Fedele 246
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there or to prot from the energy available. Gradually, they found they could
draw on organised tours, spiritual centres and printed guides (e.g. Khalsa 1981).
Like the Gaian pilgrims studied by Ivakhiv (2001, 4) at Glastonbury in
England and Sedona in Arizona, the men and women I accompanied consider
Gaia, the Earth, as a sacred feminine being that needs to be protected from
humanitys exploitation. They understand Mother Earth to be crossed by
ley lines, lines of energy, and the points where two or more of these lines cross
to be powerful places where the sacred monuments of ancient religions were
built (for example, Stonehenge in England, Machu Picchu in Peru or the
pyramids in Egypt).
12
The Gothic cathedrals, they believe, were built on this
kind of powerful site thanks to secret or heretic Christian orders like the
Templars that knew the secrets of telluric currents.
13
Like Ivakhivs pilgrims,
those I accompanied opposed capitalism and globalisation and the exploitation
of the planet.
Mary Magdalene pilgrims also have much in common with the female
Goddess pilgrims, observed by anthropologist Kathryn Rountree (2002b,
2006b), who visited the temples and other remains of ancient matriarchal
cultures,
14
and with the American Religious Creatives visiting the
Black Madonna of Rocamadour (France) that Deana Weibel accompanied
(2001, 2005). Like the women from the Goddess movement who went to Malta or
to other sacred places in Turkey, Greece or Italy to make contact with the
Goddess, the men and women I travelled with were looking for contact with what
they identied as the Sacred Feminine. They too considered physical pleasure
to be an important part of pilgrimage and criticised the soul/body dichotomy,
which they attributed to Judeo-Christian patriarchy (Rountree 2002a, 2006a).
From the pilgrims point of view both the body and the soul were pervaded by
energy and this omnipresent energy was the expression of an immanent divine
force permeating the whole world. In this context, body and soul were not
perceived as separate but as intertwined entities and physical pleasure did not
appear as an obstacle to spiritual elevation.
Like the Religious Creatives, many Mary Magdalene pilgrims visited shrines
with dark madonna statues, including the cathedral of Chartres, the basilica of
Le-Puy-en-Velay or the abbey of Saint-Victor in Marseille. They considered
these Black Madonnas as representations of the Goddess and their shrines as
located on sites of particular power.
15
The sacred geography of La Sainte-Baume
As with the Londoners practicing witchcraft in the 1980s described by Luhrmann
(1989) Mary Magdalene pilgrims had not suddenly adopted a complete set of
beliefs as a consequence of a sort of conversion to Neopaganism. They had not
simply learned to describe the same reality with a new language (Luhrmann
1989, 310) but had slowly found their own personal way to what most of them
described as spirituality. Luhrmann denes the interpretive drift as:
Culture and Religion 247
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( . . . ) the slow, often unacknowledged shift in someones manner of interpreting
events as they become involved with a particular activity. As the newcomer begins
to practice, he becomes progressively more skilled at seeing new patterns in events,
seeing new sorts of events as signicant, paying attention to new patterns.
(Luhrmann 1989, 312)
By the time they joined their groups, the Magdalene pilgrims I met were
already skilled at interpreting the world surrounding them in terms of energy, a
skill acquired through reading and workshops. They had learned to pay attention
to certain things and to recognise the effects of energy in their daily lives.
During the pilgrimage, the drift continued and the pilgrims gradually established
a different approach to the corpus of Christian notions they had received in
childhood. Unlike other Neopagans or some New Agers, these pilgrims did not
refuse Christian elements and images but interpreted them using new patterns.
The rst organised group I accompanied during my eld work was an Italian
group of three men and ten women between the ages of 35 and 53, along with a
two-year-old boy. The Italian pilgrims were from the middle and lower-middle
class, and almost all of them had attended Catholic private schools they described
as severe and austere. Most of them had been to university, some were teachers
and some had a second job as therapists using alternative healing methods.
The tour started at La Sainte-Baume at the end of July and ended 9 days later
in Vezelay in Burgundy.
16
In addition to Saint-Maximin-en-Provence and
Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the Italian group visited the Black Madonna
shrines of Rocamadour and Chartres, the Cathar fortications of Montsegur and
Carcassonne, the so-called Templar church of Montsaune`s near Toulouse,
Rennes-le-Chateau and the underground caves of Le Gouffre de Padirac.
The pilgrimage leader was Celso Bambi, described in the tours
advertisement as a naturopath who works with routes in sacred places in Italy
and in Latin America, with Dreamworking [sic] and the imaginary world, energy
techniques, healing rituals. The group spent one night at the Hotellerie sleeping
in double or triple bedrooms and sharing communal showers and bathrooms for
each oor. After breakfast, the pilgrims took the posted path that starts just aside
the Hotellerie. When they reached the edge of the woods they listened as Celso
introduced the forest as one of the most ancient in France, sacred to the Celts and
druids, who celebrated rituals there. He said the geological structure of the
mountain was unusual because the higher strata were more ancient than the
lower; they were upside down and thus promoted a revolution of norms and
values in the lives of its visitors.
17
With his explanations Celso offered his group
the basics of an esoteric body of knowledge he referred to as geography of the
spirit or sacred geography allowing them to read the signs of the landscape
and to recognise the spots that were particularly powerful and fostered a healing
process. The leader explained that the springs and caves of the wood showed that
this was a place rich in feminine energies because the water and the earth were
female elements manifesting the power of Mother Earth. This lower part
covered by trees was in contrast with the higher, rocky part of the mountain that
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was dry and exposed to the forces of the sun and the wind, expressions of re and
air, the two masculine elements.
Celsos words gave a new meaning to La Sainte-Baume, which became for
these pilgrims a place combining the four elements that sustained life, facilitating
contact with female and male energies and with the spirits of nature living in the
forest. In his terms, it was this energy structure of La Sainte-Baume that had
attracted the druids and later other persons, like Mary Magdalene, who knew
about the secret language of nature and landscape and recognised this place
immediately as a place of power. As in many other instances, the Church had
recognised the places attraction for people and had therefore transformed it into
a shrine, monopolising access to it. In this way Celso fostered an interpretive drift
in the pilgrims historical and geographical perception of the place, offering new
spatial and temporal coordinates. La Sainte-Baume was no longer just a particular
place in France but a power place linked to other similarly powerful sites all
over the world that provided privileged access to Mother Earth. In this
interpretation, the historical Catholic past of the site dwindled in importance
compared to the more ancient civilisations and religions that had allegedly
recognised its sacredness.
Celso explained that unlike the other, Catholic pilgrims, or the secular hikers
visiting that same place, his pilgrims would be fully aware of its energy and
would celebrate rituals and make energy connections to optimise the effects.
They used techniques from a corpus of beliefs and practices referred to as the
Andean tradition that Celso had learned during several years of apprenticeship
with Juan Nunez del Prado, an Andean priest and Peruvian anthropologist.
18
All
the Italian pilgrims except for one had already attended workshops about the
Andean tradition held by Celso or Nunez del Prado and were therefore
acquainted with its key concepts and practices. Everything, they had learned, was
made of energy, and people needed to become aware of and care for their energy
body or bubble that surrounded their physical body. The pilgrims knew energy
techniques that allowed them to receive light nurturing energy from the world
surrounding them and to release to Mother Earth the heavy harmful energy
that had accumulated inside their personal energy elds. They had come to
recognise negative emotions such as fear, anger or sadness as the expression of
the heavy energy in their energy eld and to let it fall down to the Earth that
received it and transformed it.
19
Like many other pilgrims I accompanied on their
journeys, these Italians already used a common energy language, and this
language was an essential element in the drifting process; it worked as a
lingua franca (Heelas 1996, 16) perceived as free from Christian and therefore
patriarchal connotations.
Before the group could enter the sacred forest, Celso had four volunteers
cleanse their fellow pilgrims. The Latin American word limpia was used to
describe this process which was meant to help the pilgrim to release the heavy
energy, thereby letting go of negative emotions and old preconceptions. The
group could then go puried into a liminal space where the dimensions of time
Culture and Religion 249
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and space lost their meaning.
20
Drawing on his background in Jungian
psychology, Celso explained that forests were places of trial and initiation,
allowing an access to the kingdom of the dead and the shadows and to the world
of the unconscious.
On entering the wood the group took the Chemin du Canape, one of the two
main paths leading up to the cave that cut right through the wood. Celso linked
his group to its historical predecessors by pointing to the similarities between its
energy techniques and medieval pilgrim practices of penance and spiritual
elevation. In this light, the groups practices acquired an historical authenticity
and legitimacy resting on two long-existing traditions, the Andean tradition
and the Christian pilgrimage tradition. Celso said that the medieval pilgrims
used to climb up to the cave symbolising Christs sepulchre in order to experience
a spiritual death and rebirth and then walked up to the Saint-Pilon chapel (where
Saint Mary Magdalene was said to be lifted to heaven by angels), circling it nine
times. This whole pilgrimage circuit permitted the remission of all sins.
In line with the Neopagan rejection of the Christian beliefs in the sinfulness of
the body and sexuality and the very existence of sin or of the devil, Celso held
that the concepts of repentance and penance associated with the Christian
pilgrimage were unnecessary for spiritual elevation. He saw La Sainte-Baume
and the route followed by the Christian pilgrims as a way to experience a spiritual
death and rebirth and attributed to the Christian terms of repentance and
penance a different meaning that did not imply physical suffering or other
practices of penance such as fasting. For Celso sin, considered as an obstacle to
spiritual evolution, could be interpreted as heavy energy and the route at La
Sainte-Baume helped the pilgrim to release this kind of energy and to open up to
transformation. Unlike Celsos pilgrims, medieval pilgrims were not conscious
of the way in which the rituals they performed worked. They approached the cave
bearing a heavy weight or walking on their knees in order to release their sins
through physical suffering. Celsos pilgrims did not need to do that because they
knew about the sacred geographical traits of La Sainte-Baume and the energy
techniques necessary to release the heavy energy. They would walk up to the
cave carrying a small stone and pass on all their heavy energy to the stone.
According to the principles of the Andean tradition, stone was an ideal material
to store energy, whether it was light or heavy. During their visit of La Sainte-
Baume and also during the rest of the pilgrimage pilgrims used stones, rocks and
caves to release their heavy energy or to receive the light, nurturing energy stored
inside of them.
Halfway up to the cave, Celso had his group stop in a place where some large
white rocks formed what he dened as a natural dolmen. He explained that this
building made of stone stored and catalysed the telluric energy of La Sainte-
Baume and that there were lines of energy crossing the mountain, probably two.
Starting from the top of the mountain at the Saint-Pilon chapel, these energy lines
passed through the cave, cutting through the forest and traversing the dolmen.
Pilgrims should therefore lie down one after another inside the dolmen and allow
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the energy stored there to enter their energy eld. The fact that Celso referred to
the rocks as a dolmen created for most of the pilgrims a link to a Celtic past of
La Sainte-Baume and led them to believe that that same spot might have been
used long ago for similar purposes. The next energy stop was a natural corridor
between two immense rocks situated on the energy lines already described.
In Celsos group and also in another exclusively female Spanish group
I accompanied in the summer of 2004, the leaders explanations showed the
pilgrims a way to analyse the landscape and interpret it based on a set of
correspondences that included the four elements of re, earth, water and air, but
also colours, gems, bodily organs and so on (Luhrmann 1989, 119, 129). These
correspondences were never fully explained, but only hinted at, and the pilgrims
only learned about them gradually, remembering the leaders analysis of events
and discussing it with their companions. Immacolata, a clerk in her 40s living on
her own in Rome, had grown up in a strongly Catholic family from Southern Italy
and led what she called a double life, concealing her interest in alternative
spirituality from her parents. She commented: Little by little you start
connecting with the places, to breathe the air of the place you visit, and then that
place takes on a different meaning.
Gradually these pilgrims learned to see Mary Magdalene as a priestess of the
pre-Christian cult of the Goddess and a sort of female equivalent of Jesus whose
importance had been expunged by the Church. They moved away from the
Christian (in this case Catholic) religion they belonged to not by a sudden
conversion to another religion but by a gradual shift towards a spirituality that
retained Christian elements. Energy and spirituality were both key concepts in
this drift process not only because they are less emotionally charged for the
pilgrims but also because of their inclusiveness as opposed to Catholicism, which
the pilgrims perceived as a rigid and inhibitory belief system. This negative
perception of Catholicism was well expressed by Luciana, a business consultant
who together with her partner Gianmichele helped Celso to organise the
pilgrimage; Luciana was 40 and lived in Rome with parents critical of her
spiritual interests. She observed:
In some remote corner of my mind, the Catholic religion keeps working as an
inquisitory brake. For this reason, when I have certain feelings there is a part of me
that feels guilty, that feels witch-like. ( . . . ) It is not easy to let emotions ow, as
Gianmichele tells me to do. I have worked on it. Now there are still some small
resistances that make me think ( . . . ) that a woman must be sweet and good
[buonina], she must not do certain things. She must not be the so-called witch. Yet
I learned, little by little, that being a witch is not so terrible after all, if we mean of
course ( . . . ) a person who is able to have certain kinds of sensations, to understand
certain natural schemes and to act as an intermediary between Mother Earth, the
female energy, the cosmic energy and the world. In this sense there is nothing at all
witch-like.
(Personal interview 2005, April 9)
Culture and Religion 251
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Contacting the energy of Mary Magdalene
Celsos pilgrims were told that the most important place of La Sainte-Baume was
the cave where Mary Magdalene was said to have lived, its importance
recognised not only by Celso, but also by the Christian pilgrims of the past and
present and even the ancient druids. For Celso, the cave represented one of the
gateways to the power of La Sainte-Baume as a telluric location, a way into
Mother Earths womb and a place to meet Mary Magdalenes energy. Here,
the Italian pilgrims would offer their stones charged with their heavy energy, in a
sort of symbolical counterpart to the penitential practices of medieval Christian
pilgrims.
Susanna, a woman from Rome in her 40s working as an executive secretary,
was menstruating. Celso suggested she offer as well her menstrual blood inside
the cave as a female homage to Mother Earth on behalf of the whole group.
21
After the offerings, the pilgrims gathered for a ritual of anointment with
spikenard oil performed by Costanza, a psychologist and healer in her 40s. After
connecting with Mary Magdalene, she acted as a sort of human receptacle of
Her energy. Unnoticed by the Dominican friars who supervised the activities in
the cave and scarcely noticed by the other visitors, Costanza put her hands on the
head of each pilgrim and then anointed with oil the forehead of each pilgrim to
pass on Magdalenes energy.
After the anointment, the pilgrims sat down or stood in a place of their choice
for a while with closed eyes; then each of them had time for personal rituals of
connection: several lit candles; some took photographs; and others prayed.
After a short historical tour of the cave led by a Dominican friar, the pilgrims
had a picnic lunch sitting in front of the cave entrance and bought postcards and
little medals at the small souvenir shop. Celso explained that now that the
pilgrims had ritually died entering the cave and had ritually been reborn coming
out of it, they could continue their itinerary of elevation. At the Saint-Pilon
chapel, the pilgrims circumambulated clockwise nine times the small building,
releasing on each circuit one attachment they perceived as an impediment in their
personal spiritual evolution. Then, they stood for a while with their eyes closed
and their arms open, experiencing their own elevation. Some of them told me
later of having felt a sense of expansion and limitlessness, enhanced by the
panoramic view.
From what the pilgrims told me it seemed that at La Sainte-Baume, there
were two main kinds of healing energies available. On one hand, there was the
so-called telluric energy linked to the geophysical characteristics of the place
and the other the energy of Mary Magdalene, a consequence of her legendary
stay there (compare Weibel 2005, 11617). There was a relationship between
these different energies, and the existence of each conrmed, in the pilgrims
terms, the existence of the other. The fact that Mary Magdalene, like the druids
before her, had chosen La Sainte-Baume as a place of refuge conrmed the fact
that it was powerful and sacred; and the fact that Mary Magdalene could
A. Fedele 252
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recognise the places energy conrmed that she was a priestess of the Goddess
with privileged access to the forces of Mother Earth. Immacolata described her
feelings visiting La Sainte-Baume:
I had a strong sense of great power, a very strong power, related to the Mother
Goddess, I had this sensation very strongly ( . . . ) at the Mont Pilon. And at the cave
of the Sainte-Baume there was a strong link that I felt with the Earth, with the
Mother Goddess, with the Magdalene and with this truly generative force that
Magdalene brought with her.
(Personal interview 2005, April 8)
In contrast to those Christian pilgrims, in the past and present, who could
benet from the power of the cave and the chapel only through the mediation of
the Church, these Italian pilgrims felt they could tap directly into the energies at
La Sainte-Baume without the mediation of any religious institution. They could
even nd powerful spots not identied by the Church and hidden in the forest,
visible only to those who can read the landscape following the principles of
sacred geography. A commonplace in the New Age and feminist spirituality is
that there is no need for intermediaries to connect with the divine forces that
pervade the physical world. In this sense, Celso was not like a priest who
mediated between the pilgrims and the supernatural, but rather a kind of
facilitator who helped them nd the places appropriate for deploying their energy
techniques.
Celsos way of describing the mountain and the forest of La Sainte-Baume as
a sacred landscape introduced the pilgrims into a place marked not only by the
presence of Catholic buildings and meanings but also by other layers of meaning.
In this context, Mary Magdalene appeared as a sort of transversal sacred gure
that belonged to both Christian and Neopagan traditions. The presence of the
Dominican friars and of statues representing Magdalene as a repentant prostitute
(as opposed to a powerful priestess of the Goddess) did not disturb the Italian
pilgrims, and some of them even used the Catholic images or candles to
strengthen their link to the place and to Mary Magdalene. For them, the cave was
an ancient gateway to Mother Earth, one used well before the arrival of
Christianity that had been turned into a church only later.
Pilgrims, in Celsos group and in the other organised groups I accompanied,
saw themselves as re-connecting Christian symbols with their original meaning.
La Sainte-Baume appeared as a realm of competing discourses (Eade and
Sallnow 1991, 5) in which the pilgrims saw the Celts as their allies because of a
supposed shared matriarchal background and the Catholic clergy as their
principal enemies.
22
Pilgrims tried to subvert the Christian system, most of all, in
terms of gender, by venerating a female deity manifest physically through
Mother Earth. Immacolata told me that during the pilgrimage she had
discovered a spirituality that was intimately connected with the body, with
nature in short with the world and that derived its strength from there.
Culture and Religion 253
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Unlike the pilgrims from the other organised groups I later accompanied,
Celsos pilgrims did not know The Da Vinci code, because in August 2003 the
novel had not yet been published in Italian and had not yet become a bestseller in
Europe. Most of the things these Italians knew about the saint derived from
Celsos explanations at the group meeting at the Hotellerie on the rst evening of
the pilgrimage. Drawing on different texts belonging to a spiritual-esoteric
literature,
23
Celso had taught his pilgrims to reinterpret the gospel episodes
relating to Mary Magdalene as if she were a priestess of the Goddess. Celso
accepted the already mentioned Gregorian conation of Mary Magdalene with
other female gures of the gospels and interpreted the episodes of Magdalene
washing Jesus feet and anointing him with spikenard oil in terms of an
initiation and of passing on energy and spiritual knowledge.
Celsos pilgrims, like the others I accompanied, were by no means passive
receptacles, but rather made a creative use of the notions about Mary Magdalene
they read in books or heard from the group leaders. They tested the information
they received by their own sensations and perceptions when visiting places
where they encountered her energy. After the pilgrimage, I spoke with
Gianmichele, an environmentalist in his late 40s, who explained that before and
after the trip he had read many books offering different versions of the life and
role of the saint but after comparing these data with the Magdalene he perceived,
he had come to his own conclusions:
I dont have historical data, there is no precise information. As to what the apostles
say about her [I think that] compared to the others [the other disciples], she surely
had already received a sort of initiation to a non-Judaic mystery cult, and she
therefore managed to create together with Jesus a kind of integration of two
traditions, blending what was probably the tradition of the Great Goddess with
another tradition more linked to Judaism. ( . . . ) And so she had already been
initiated or even was a spiritual leader of a cult that referred to the Great Goddess.
So the Goddess had a contact with Jesus for me the washing of the feet is an
emblematic moment in that sense. ( . . . ) It is almost as if by washing his feet she had
initiated him, allowing him to become the Christ. ( . . . ) So that was not simply an
act of reverence but a real initiation rite that the others have obviously interpreted
as . . . well, as that what appears in the gospels.
(Personal interview 2005, April 3)
Referring to the fact that Christ literally means the anointed one,
Gianmichele believed, as did many of the pilgrims I accompanied, that it was
because of Magdalenes anointment that Jesus could become the Christ and
rescue humankind. This critical role of Magdalene as an initiator of Jesus and
later as the spiritual master bringing Jesus and her own teachings to Gaul had
been obscured by the Church. Apart from Mary Magdalene as a historical
person having lived at the time of Jesus, it was the metaphysical being
Mary Magdalene that attracted the pilgrims, because the metaphysical being
could still be contacted today and could still bring about healing.
24
A. Fedele 254
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Like the Spanish pilgrims travelling on their own or in groups I accompanied,
all the Italians in Celsos group had been brought up as Catholics and used
ideas and values derived from feminist spirituality to interpret Christianity.
The re-interpretation of Christian legends, holy texts, rituals and buildings offered
by Celso appealed to them. Even if they criticised the Church, they did not want
to renounce the symbols and places belonging to their tradition or to embrace a
strict set of beliefs. Uncomfortable with the Churchs restrictions on sexuality,
marriage and procreation, the pilgrims created with the help of their leaders and
their spiritual-esoteric reading a personal set of beliefs and spiritual techniques
without making a total break from their Catholic past. Mary Magdalene appeared
as an ideal mediator in this blending of Christian and Neopagan elements. Seen as
a Christian saint who played an important role at Jesus side, but also an exponent
of the pre-Christian and pre-patriarchal cult of the Goddess, the pilgrims
Magdalene embodies the union of these two sets of beliefs.
Following the invitation of Frey (1998, 2004), Coleman (2002) and others,
whenever it was possible, I followed the pilgrims life stories after their
pilgrimages to see how their experiences during this sacred journey inuenced
their perceptions and choices. When I talked to them again in April 2005, many
of the Italian pilgrims had read The Da Vinci code, and even if most of them did
not totally agree with Dan Browns theories, they were happy that the books
success had brought Mary Magdalene more attention. To them, the novel was a
sort of gateway through which her energy could reach many readers and
maybe lead them to look further and to question the patriarchal structures of
society.
Conclusions
There has been a lack of scholarly attention paid to pilgrims, inuenced by the
Neopagan movement, visiting European shrines. The fragmentary nature of Mary
Magdalene pilgrimage groups, their need to transcend religious afliations and
their high degree of individuality make it difcult to describe them and to
establish how representative they are. Twenty years after Luhrmanns pioneering
work, beliefs about the existence of energy or of an aura or energy eld
surrounding the human body are now part of everyday conversation and can be
found in bestselling books.
25
Nevertheless, many alternative-minded pilgrims
from European countries with a Catholic past like Spain, France or Italy still tend
to be secretive about their beliefs and share them only with those they perceive as
similar.
Paradoxically, the revitalisation of certain French medieval pilgrimage
shrines
26
like La Sainte-Baume, Chartres or Vezelay takes place not so much
through practising Catholics but to a new kind of pilgrim that challenges the
tourist/pilgrim divide. In order to understand Mary Magdalene pilgrims as well as
other contemporary pilgrims like those described in the volume Intersecting
journeys; The anthropology of pilgrimage and tourism (Badone and Roseman
Culture and Religion 255
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2004), we need to overcome the dichotomy between pilgrimage considered as
religious and pious travel and tourism as a kind of secular, often consumptive
journey, as the authors (Badone and Roseman 2004, 13) suggest.
La Sainte-Baume emerged from most pilgrims accounts as the place
related to Mary Magdalene. The leaders interpretations of La Sainte-Baume and
the rituals that the groups performed there were central for understanding these
pilgrimages as a whole. On the route of Mary Magdalene, there are many other
multi-layered shrines worthy of further study, such as Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-
Mer, Vezelay, Rocamadour or Chartres (Fedele 2008a). Badone (2008) analysed
the shrine of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la Mer and the gypsy pilgrimage to it as an
example of a busy intersection (Rosaldo 1993). She described four Belgian
women attending the gypsy pilgrimage in May 2006 who held that Saint Sara
unites and embodies the powerful masculine and feminine spiritual energies
symbolised respectively by Christ and Mary Magdalene.
27
The energy discourse
shared by these Belgian women and the Italian and the other pilgrims
I accompanied demonstrates a new way of nding meaning in Christian gures
and sites that from the pilgrims standpoint is free from the Churchs inuence
and patriarchal structures.
As we have seen, the energy discourse was one of the basic elements of the
pilgrims interpretive drift towards feminist spirituality; before they joined the
pilgrimage, this shift had already begun through reading and workshops.
Pilgrims had learned the basic notions of a language and world view that allowed
them to recognise each other almost immediately as like-minded and establish a
sense of community. This drifting process continued during the pilgrimage,
helped along by a leader who showed them how to consider the elements of the
Christian tradition as distortions of an original pre-patriarchal and pre-Christian
culture. Mary Magdalene pilgrims acquired a new grammar to describe reality
but also an alternative historiography dening their ancestors (Celts, Cathars,
Templars and other heretic movements inuenced by pre-patriarchal religions)
and their historical antagonists (the Churchs fathers and the exponents of
patriarchy). In this process they appropriated elements from different traditions
(the Andean tradition in the Italian case), extracted terms, myths and rituals
from their original cultural and social contexts (e.g. Mother Earth, limpia)
and learned to describe the efcacy of their rituals with an energy language and
also with terms and theories deriving from Jungian psychology (e.g.
unconscious). As we have seen, Celso had a background in psychology and
adapted Jungian theories to interpret the forest of the Sainte-Baume as an
entrance to the underworld. This kind of psychologisation (Hanegraaff 1996,
224) seemed to add an extra layer of credibility to his discourse for the pilgrims
(Fedele 2009).
As with the Religious Creatives described by Weibel (2005, 121), Mary
Magdalene pilgrims felt an afnity with the pilgrimage sites imagined true
founders (i.e. the Celts) but they also perceived continuity with past Christians
whom they consider as ignorant pilgrims doing things in the right place without
A. Fedele 256
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knowing really how and why. Reappropriating La Sainte-Baume by
reinterpreting the Christian meanings imposed on it also allowed the pilgrims
to make sense of their life stories and to resignify the Catholic beliefs and
practices learned in their younger years.
28
Through their pilgrimages the pilgrims claimed their right to use the power
places appropriated by the Church, to perform their own rituals there and to
contact the Sacred Feminine and the energy of Mary Magdalene thereby
restoring the saint to her true importance. The Catholic guardians of La Sainte-
Baume were not taking measures to limit the ritual use of the cave or the
Hotellerie by non-Catholics.
This kind of Neopagan pilgrimage to European shrines is likely to increase.
It provides insight on a feeling of attraction and repulsion towards Christian
beliefs, images and places in the New Age and Neopagan movement and in
other new religious movements. Mary Magdalene pilgrims manage to solve the
tension between the inuence and attraction of their Christian past and their
present critique of Christian rules and concepts. They use an energy language and
a sort of transhistorical and transreligious set of equivalences. The drift from
Christian religion towards a spirituality with Christian elements allows them to
embrace a new set of beliefs without abandoning the well-known divinities of
their religious background. As we can see from the popularity of the novels of
Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown, a drifting continuity as opposed to a rupture with
the Christian past is proving increasingly attractive.
Acknowledgements
I thank Elisabeth Claverie, William Christian and Jose Luis Molina, who were supervisors
for my dissertation, and also Michael Houseman, Joan Prat and Enric Porqueres, who were
members of my PhD committee. I thank Sabina Magliocco, who discussed with me by
e-mail the denitions and characteristics of the different groups related to Neopaganism. I
am also grateful to Ellen Badone, Mary Crain, Damien De Blic, Nancy Frey, Maria del
Mar Griera, Ruy Llera Blanes, Tanya M. Luhrmann, Josep Mart , Cedric Masse, Deborah
Puccio, Kathryn Rountree, Ramon Sarro, Donatella Schmidt, Verena Stolcke, Montserrat
Ventura, and Deana Weibel. Finally, I thank Kim Knibbe, who provided useful feedback
for this article and allowed me to cite her yet unpublished article.
Notes
1. According to some other versions of the legend, Mary Magdalene spent 33 years at
La Sainte-Baume.
2. See Hutton (1999) for an extensive study of the origin and development of Neopagan
beliefs. For a description of Neopaganism from within the movement (Adler
1979/1986). For ethnographic studies about Neopagans in the USA (Magliocco
2001, 2004; Pike 2001; Salomonsen 2002; in Great Britain, Greenwood 2000).
3. Throughout the text, I refer to terms and phrases commonly used by the pilgrims of
different nationalities I accompanied. These citations derive from the pilgrimage
leaders explanations to their groups or from conversations overheard among the
Culture and Religion 257
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pilgrims. All citations of single pilgrims come from personal interviews, and the
translations from Catalan, Spanish or Italian are mine.
4. I put the termNew Age between quotation marks because it tended to be perceived as
derogatory by the pilgrims I accompanied, and self-dened New Agers have
practically ceased to exist (Weibel 2005, 11314). See also Pike (2001, 14446).
5. More generally, Luhrmanns approach can be useful to understand religious
movements related to Neopaganismdescribed by Adler (1979/1986, 14) as a religion
without converts.
6. For a detailed analysis of Mary Magdalenes status and attributes as a Catholic saint
through the centuries (Saxer 1959; Sebastiani 1992; Haskins 1993; Maisch 1996;
Jansen 2000).
7. Books and theatre plays presenting Mary Magdalene as the sexual partner of
Jesus were in circulation by the end of the nineteenth century (Haskins 1993, 375),
but the idea of a relationship between the two goes back to the gospel of Philip
(Robinson 1978, 138).
8. For further details about the Sangraal theory and the secret dossiers, it relies upon
(Iannaccone 2004).
9. For a more detailed analysis of this kind of literature about Mary Magdalene
(Fedele 2008a).
10. There is evidence of alternative pilgrimages to energy sites unrelated to Mary
Magdalene since the 1970s.
11. In the nearby town of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, inside the basilica described by a
panel on the highway as the third tomb of Christianity, the remains of saint Mary
Magdalene are on display in the crypt.
12. As Ivakhiv (2001, 2224) points out, the pilgrims are inuenced by Lovelocks
(1979) and Watkins (1925/1984).
13. The main theories about the power of Gothic cathedrals and their mysteries derive
from Fulcanelli (1929/1964).
14. For a detailed analysis of feminist spirituality and its belief in a matriarcal past
(Eller 1993, 2000).
15. The main theories about the power of Black Madonnas are contained in Begg
(1985); for a more detailed analysis of the meanings attributed to dark Madonna
statues (Christian 1995; Scheer 2002; Fedele 2008b).
16. For a detailed itinerary of the tour (Fedele 2008a).
17. The higher geological strata (from the Jurassic) are more ancient than the lower strata
(from the Cretaceous). For more details about the geological structure of the Massif
de la Sainte-Baume and its explanation (http://www.ecomusee-sainte-baume.asso.
fr).
18. For a detailed analysis of neo-shamanism in Peru (Galinier and Molinie 2006).
The two French anthropologists also refer to Juan Nunez Del Prados teachings and
tours. For a discussion of transcultural borrowing among neo-shamans (Pike 2001,
12354; Fedele 2008b, 12433).
19. For a more detailed overview of the Andean tradition and the energy techniques
used by the Italian pilgrims and also the pilgrims from other groups (Fedele 2008b).
20. I have described the inuence on Mary Magdalene pilgrims of anthropological
theories such as those of Van Gennep (1908/1960) on rites of passage and Turner and
Turner (1978) on pilgrimage, liminality and communitas in Fedele (2008b, 39093).
21. For a more detailed analysis of this and other menstrual blood offerings at La Sainte-
Baume (Fedele 2006b, 2008b, 21364); on the importance of menstrual blood and
menstrual rituals inside the Neopagan movement (Salomonsen 2002; Houseman
2007).
A. Fedele 258
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22. Bowman (1996) discusses beliefs about the Celts as a matriarchal civilization in the
New Age and Neopagan movements.
23. On the corpus of spiritual esoteric literature related to Mary Magdalene (Fedele
2006a, 2008b).
24. In their edited volume Dubisch and Winkelmann (2005) emphasize the importance
of healing in the pilgrimage experience.
25. Bestselling books such as Redelds (1993) or Chopras books (e.g. 1989, 2008).
26. Frey (1998, 2004) mentions pilgrims on the Camino to Santiago inuenced by the New
Age movement and particularly by Coelhos book (1994) about this pilgrimage route.
27. Badone also refers to an American group on a tour organized by Celtic Mystical
Journey, a company that specializes in sacred journeys to sites in France associated
with Mary Magdalene, the legends of the Holy Family, the Black Madonna, the
Holy Grail, Cathars, Templars and the Troubadours.
28. This was particularly true for Italian and Spanish women, who could thereby
reconceptualize their femininity in a more positive way (Fedele 2006b).
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