Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford Ritual Studies) [1 ed.] 9780199898404, 9780199898428, 0199898405

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Looking for Mary Magdalene

OXFORD RITUAL STUDIES Series Editors Ronald Grimes Ute Hüsken, University of Oslo Eric Venbrux, Radboud University Nijmegen THE PROBLEM OF RITUAL EFFICACY Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold PERFORMING THE REFORMATION Public Ritual in the City of Luther Barry Stephenson RITUAL, MEDIA, AND CONFLICT Edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken, Udo Simon, and Eric Venbrux KNOWING BODY, MOVING MIND Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers Patricia Q. Campbell SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITIES How Rituals Enact the World Frédérique Apffel-Marglin NEGOTIATING RITES Edited by Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert THE DANCING DEAD Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria Walter E. A. van Beek LOOKING FOR MARY MAGDALENE Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France Anna Fedele

Looking for Mary Magdalene Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France

ANNA FEDELE

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2013 by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fedele, Anna. Looking for Mary Magdalene : alternative pilgrimage and ritual creativity at Catholic shrines in France / Anna Fedele. p. cm. —(Oxford ritual studies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-0-19-989840-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-989842-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mary Magdalene, Saint. 2. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages—France. 3. Christian shrines—France. I. Title. BS2485.F43 2013 263c.04244—dc23 2012003804

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Cédric and Maya, to the pilgrims who generously shared their stories, and to the memory of Roger Woolger

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 3 1. “Going to See Mary Magdalene”: Starting Out on a Pilgrimage 2. The Lost Connection with The Feminine 59 3. The Sainte-Baume and Its Many Layers 83 4. Pilgrims Dealing with Their Christian Backgrounds 123 5. Celebrating Menstrual Blood 145 6. Wounded Magdalenes 191 7. Embracing The Darkness 217 8. Ending The Pilgrimage And Returning Home 243 Conclusion 265 Notes

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References Maps

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This text is based on my dissertation “Mary Magdalene, Menstrual Blood and Mother Earth; an Anthropology of Spiritual Feminist Pilgrimages in France and Catalonia” (2008), written under the joint supervision of William A. Christian Jr., Élisabeth Claverie, and José Luís Molina for a joint Ph.D at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. My research on Mary Magdalene pilgrimages started in 2002, when I accompanied some independent pilgrims to visit La Sainte-Baume as part of my fieldwork for my master’s thesis. Over the years many friends and colleagues have helped me making this project possible and also pleasurable. William Christian provided readings and comments for this research, first as the official director of my MA thesis and later as a cosupervisor of this dissertation; he was always there to answer the many doubts that I had to face while writing a dissertation and later revising it for publication. Élisabeth Claverie offered precious insights and encouragement and introduced me to the creative research of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, which opened new horizons. José Luis Molina provided constant support for the project and helped overcome the bureaucratic problems related to a European doctorate. Michael Houseman, Enric Porqueres, and Joan Prat were on my dissertation committee and provided attentive readings and comments, as did the external readers Ramon Sarró and Donatella Schmidt. Danièle Hervieu-Léger commented on my fieldwork during my stay as an invited researcher at the Centre d’Études Interdisciplinaires des Faits Religieux of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Tanya Luhrmann discussed my research with me on different occasions, and particularly during my stay as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The Rotary Foundation and later the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol offered the financial support for this research, and I thank especially Franco Kettmeir, Sergio Sánchez, and Llorenç Maristany.

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For the editing of this text I am grateful to Mark Shannon, Susan Coffey, and Claire Reed, and to William Christian for his patience. Roman Vogl helped me with the illustrations and graphics and Eric Charpentier kindly allowed me to use his photographs of La Sainte-Baume. At Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read and Charlotte Steinhardt were always ready to help. During the process from thesis to book, Stanley Holwitz provided critical suggestions for revisions. Ramon Sarró and Antónia Pedroso de Lima offered suggestions and encouragement in their role of supervisors of my fellowship at the Center for Research in Anthropology at the Lisbon University Institute, with a scholarship funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Ute Hüsken and Ronald Grimes made valuable suggestions to an earlier draft of this text as did two anonymous readers. Eric Venbrux trusted in this text and provided helpful guidance during the revisions. My 2004 MA thesis, “María Magdalena en la Nueva Era. Un estudio antropológico sobre un mito cristiano contemporáneo y un nuevo tipo de peregrinación” (Mary Magdalene in the New Age. An Anthropological Study about a Contemporary Christian Myth and a New Kind of Pilgrimage), has been published under the title El Camino de María Magdalena (The Route of Mary Magdalene) Barcelona: RBA (2008). Several parts of this book have been presented as papers at international conferences and some of them have been or will be published as chapters in edited books or articles. Some sections of chapter 3 form part of the article “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality; Mary Magdalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France” that appeared in Culture and Religion, 10:3, pp. 243–261 (2009). Other sections of chapters 3 and 5 offered the basis for the chapter “Gender, Sexuality and Religious Critique among Mary Magdalene Pilgrims in Southern France” in the volume Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage edited by Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). Some sections of an earlier version of chapter 5 provided the basis for the article “Sacred Blood, Sacred Body: Learning to Honour Menstruation on the Path of Mary Magdalene,” published in the online journal Periferia 5 (www. periferia.name), and are based on a paper I presented at the symposium “Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches,” held at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon in September 2005. I am grateful to Ramon Sarró and David Berliner who organized the event, as well as to Carlos Fausto, Arnaud Halloy, Charles Hirschkind, Adeline Masquelier, David Parkins, and João de Pina Cabral for their suggestions and commentaries. Other sections of chapter 5 form part of an article entitled “Reversing Eve’s Curse: Contemporary Spirituality and the Creative Ritualization of Menstruation,” currently under peer review; this article is based on a paper presented at the anthropology department of Stanford university in March 2011. I thank Maria Balfer, Paula England, Charlotte Fonrobert, Hester Gelber, Claudia Liuzza,

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Rachel Morgaine, Sabina Magliocco, Barbara Pitkin, and Sylvia Yanagisako for their comments. Some sections of chapter 7 provided the basis for the chapter “‘Black’ Madonna Versus ‘White’ Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines,” that forms part of the volume Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality; Ethnographic Approaches that I edited with Kim Knibbe (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Finally, some sections from the introduction as well as from chapters 1 and 2 have provided the basis for the chapter “The Metamorphoses of Neopaganism in Traditionally Catholic Countries in Southern Europe,” in the volume edited by Ruy Llera Blanes and José Mapril, Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Thanks are due to a considerable number of people who discussed with me different issues related to my research and offered suggestions and encouragement during different periods spent in Barcelona, Paris, Lisbon, and Palo Alto: Dionigi Albera, Marlène Albert-Llorca, Jean-Pierre Albert, Joan Alegret, Elizabeth Araiza, Emma Aubin, Ellen Badone, Helen Berger, Luc Boltanski, Katia Boissevain, Lorenzo Bordonaro, Philippe Boutry, Jean-Pierre Brach, Micol Brazzabeni, Michael F. Brown, Thomas Buckley, Maria Cardeira da Silva, Giovanni Careri, Giordana Charuty, Simon Coleman, Martin Correa, Mary Crain, Damien De Blic, Manuel Delgado, Philippe Descola, Susan Di Giacomo, Nicolas Dodier, Jill Dubisch, Jean-Yves Durand, John Eade, Keith Egan, Diana Espirito Santo, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Jackie Feldman, Ambra Formenti, Simone Frangella, Lena Gemzöe, Aurora González, Nelson Graburn, Nancy Frey, Nella Gonzalo, Alma Gottlieb, Carla Graef, Jordi Grau, Maria del Mar Griera, Wendy Griffin, Susan Haskins, Melissa Harrington, Loida Ibars, Cyril Isnart, Katherine Jansen, Willy Jansen, Olivia Kindl, Kim Knibbe, Valerie Kozlowski, Ruy Llera Blanes, José Mapril, Josep Martì, Monica Martínez, Elio Masferrer, Marika Moisseeff, Joan Muela, Catrien Notermans, Marco Pasi, David Picard, Sarah Pike, Kevin Pittle, Rolando Poblete, Joan Prat, Deborah Puccio-Den, Chiara Pussetti, Paulo Raposo, Filipe Reis, Filip Rogalski, Kathryn Rountree, Eugenia Roussou, Robert Rowland, Susan Russell, Raquel Sala, Carmen Salcedo, Jone Salomonsen, Sofia Sampaio, Clara Saraiva, Monique Scheer, Valerio Simoni, Verena Stolcke, Lawrence Taylor, Cristina Toren, Francesco Vacchiano, Montserrat Ventura, Deana Weibel, and Laurel Zwissler. I also thank my friends Isabella and Christine Berger, Lisa von Braitenberg, Jordi Calmet, Tiziana Cancellieri, Rudá de Cássia Andrade, Amelia Cortés, Gérald De Loen, Karin Egger, Valentina Emeri, Sara Gomes da Silva, Omar Galimberti, Sebastian Mayrgündter, Melissa Pritchard, Stefano Sulligi, and David Tevar, as well as Rommy and the Trocker family, who kept my spirits up and gave useful suggestions. My parents Gianfranco and Giovanna Fedele supported me with their love, particularly during the redaction of this text. Warm thanks to my

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partner Cédric Masse for his suggestions and his patience and care, and to my daughter Maya, who participated in the long revision process first by kicking in my belly and later by patiently playing on her own in the same room where her mother was taking care of her other, intellectual child. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank Lara Owen and all the pilgrims for their trust and their enthusiasm. I am especially grateful to Celso Bambi, Gianmichele Ferrero, Maria Antònia Segalés, Jane May, Roger Woolger, and Margot Henderson, who has kindly let me use her poems.

Looking for Mary Magdalene

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Introduction

Margot had just turned fifty when she joined an organized group in Marseille and set off on a pilgrimage called a Magdalenetour. This Scottish lady had always felt a particular connection with Mary Magdalene, as she had been born into what she described as the Scottish equivalent to a Magdalene house. It was a convent, where her Irish mother gave birth and left her for adoption with a family who could guarantee her a solid Catholic education. Margot wanted the trip as a fiftieth birthday present and organized a fundraising birthday party to pay for it. She talked to me about her relationship to Mary Magdalene: I think [that when I was young] I had a very strong connection [with Mary Magdalene] in a less conscious way: as a baby who was born in secret into a convent, and adopted because her mother couldn’t keep her and had to have her in secret. I was born into a convent and, as I grew, the sense of what it meant grew with me. It was around the time of my own puberty that I realized that my mother had been an unmarried woman, so in that sense she was seen as a “fallen woman.” There were lots of attitudes around “bad blood” for me as an adopted baby. I might turn out bad like my mother. Later on, I myself had a child outside of marriage. So my sense of Her [Mary Magdalene] grew as I did. In those days I associated Her with the woman who was stoned, the scorned one, later as the chosen one. And for myself also, I was a chosen one. I was a baby who was given away, but also chosen. So that sense of Magdalene as the scorned woman and the chosen one was very poignant for me. As I grew up, I reclaimed my sexuality and my right to have a child outside of marriage; to live my sexuality unbound by convention. And that sense of a liberated Magdalene grew for me. And, you know, much more a sense of Her as a woman in Her own right and then something about reclaiming the . . . not just my blood mother but my . . . ancient mother in a way, so that became a real journey for me to search more deeply for Her, for a sense of a wild woman, a free woman, and a priestess. I guess I’ve always been mystical and had a deep interest in the sacred and the 3

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sense that a woman could experience both her sexuality and her divine ecstasy in the same way. (October 2, 2005)1 During the last twenty-five years an increasing number of pilgrims who do not identify themselves as practicing Christians have visited Catholic pilgrimage shrines in France, particularly shrines to Mary Magdalene or featuring dark Madonnas, in order to benefit from these places’ “energy” and the power of the “Sacred Feminine.” This book seeks to situate the theories and ritual practices of these pilgrims in the wider context of alternative spirituality and Neopaganism in the United States and Europe, and to describe how Neopagan concepts are slowly finding their way into predominantly Catholic countries like Italy and Spain. It also considers the importance of ritual creativity for the pilgrims and the transformative effects these invented rituals have on them. In referring to Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims, I apply the word “pilgrim” broadly to people visiting places they consider to be sacred and to have a particular link to Mary Magdalene. They tend to think of their trip as an inner as well as an outer journey, and usually decide to undertake it with a special purpose in mind. Some embark on the journey on their own or with friends. Others, like Margot, prefer an organized pilgrimage led by a guide. The places these pilgrims consider relevant are mostly churches and shrines linked to the Catholic tradition that have been visited by Catholic pilgrims for centuries. This book is based on observations of three organized pilgrimages and several independent spiritual travelers; it focuses on these pilgrims’ use of the metaempirical being identified as Mary Magdalene and the way they visit and perform rituals at Catholic shrines, at the same time fiercely criticizing the Catholic religion. The Magdalene pilgrims, who often come from Catholic families, consider this saint a sort of feminine equivalent to Jesus and an important reference point for women’s empowerment. They tend to have a strong background in spiritual ideas linked to the New Age,2 feminist spirituality, and neoshamanism, and decide to visit the places they have read or heard about in order to experience for themselves the power of Mary Magdalene. The pilgrims I accompanied came from four different countries (Spain, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States). But while their leaders used different rituals and explanatory material, these rituals and theories had important points in common. From the 1990s on, more and more Westerners became fascinated with the figure of Mary Magdalene and felt drawn to visit the places in France where, as Christian legend has it, the saint arrived after fleeing from Palestine after the crucifixion of Jesus. When The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was published in 2003, the quest that had already captured Westerners involved in Neopaganism and other forms of contemporary spirituality—the quest for Mary Magdalene—became a social phenomenon.3 The seeds of the novel’s success had already been germinating since the early 1980s. Influenced by books like the best-selling The Holy Blood and

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the Holy Grail by the British journalists Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982) and later authors such as Margaret Starbird or the French couple Daniel and Anne Meurois-Givaudan,4 an increasing number of people already considered Magdalene as a feminine equivalent of Jesus and as a woman who was Jesus’s companion and initiated into the mysteries of the Goddess religion. In 1999, I was climbing to the castle at the summit of the town of Udine in northeastern Italy. Andrea, a warm-hearted man in his forties, was patiently answering my many questions on feminine spirituality. Since his university years, Andrea had been interested in spiritual themes, and for a while he had been part of the Rosicrucian movement in Rome. In his thirties he accepted a job as a computer programmer and moved to Udine. Andrea told me his view of Mary Magdalene and her importance within Christianity, describing her as the companion of Jesus. What immediately captured my attention was that Andrea spoke of Magdalene as a priestess of the Goddess who knew the secrets of sacred sexuality, and had shared them with Jesus. At that point I did not know much about Mary Magdalene. I was not baptized and had been excused from Catechism at school. At home I had been taught that Jesus was one spiritual teacher among many, and for all I knew he might well have had a partner. On arrival at his home, Andrea showed me an entire section of his library that he identified as Mary Magdalene-related. It contained books about Black Madonnas, the Templar Knights, and the Holy Grail, and seemed to be a different and astonishing world. I subsequently obtained my BA in anthropology and forgot about Mary Magdalene and her mysteries. But she came up again in 2002, when I was doing fieldwork on neoshamans in Catalonia and visited the Cathedral in Barcelona with Sebastián, an attractive Uruguayan in his fifties who taught what he called shamanic techniques. He had lived most of his life in France and had recently settled near Barcelona, having spent some time living in the Brazilian Amazon with people he referred to as natives. Passing by the statue of Mary Magdalene, he described the saint as a powerful woman. Later he added that he knew of a group of women working with her energy who organized pilgrimages to Southern France, to the places were Mary Magdalene had lived after Jesus’s death. Intrigued by the way certain ideals driven from Christianity, shamanism, and feminism were flowing together into a complex structure of theories, I thus decided to focus my research on the figure of Mary Magdalene and those I later discovered to be her pilgrims.

From Pilgrimage to Ritual There are few detailed ethnographic descriptions of the new religious movements in mainland Europe usually grouped under the umbrella term of Neopaganism.5 Scholars studying Goddess spirituality, neoshamanism, feminist, and

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earth-based spirituality in mainland Europe and their respective rituals have tended to focus on the participants’ discourses and on the texts they cite or produce. So far little attention has been paid to the everyday activities and the rituals of the people involved, and the way they live their spirituality.6 My aim is to describe in detail a new form of pilgrimage to Catholic shrines, paying attention to the common features of the pilgrimage groups I accompanied without reducing the important differences existing among them. When talking about their expectations before their journeys several pilgrims described the pilgrimage as a sort of rite of passage that would allow them to transform themselves in some way. Two of the pilgrimage leaders also explicitly referred to the fact that there would be a before and after to the pilgrimage, thereby creating concrete expectations inside their groups. Pilgrims and leaders were totally at ease using terms such as initiation rites or rite of passage that they knew from texts on shamanism, spirituality, or pilgrimage that they had read.7 As other scholars have noted in the case of Neopagan groups and ritual entrepreneurs in the United States,8 they tend to appropriate the works of anthropologists and religious scholars such as Margaret Murray, Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Margaret Mead, Michael Harner, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade. In the ongoing creation of their pilgrimage experience, both leaders and pilgrims shared or ended up sharing certain assumptions about ritual creativity observed by other scholars who have looked at crafted rituals.9 For leaders and pilgrims, their new rituals made up for a lack of celebration and acknowledgment of both classical life passages and of newer forms like abortion, divorce, and hysterectomies. Many pilgrims described the pilgrimage as a sort of remedy against a perceived lack of connection with the Feminine, and an absence of rituals to celebrate it. Ritual creativity deploying scholarly and esoteric knowledge is an important feature not only of alternative pilgrimages, but more generally of the kind of spirituality that has attracted a growing number of individuals in the West since the 1960s. Rather than dismiss this kind of religious and ritual creativity as yet another form of romantic reenchantment of the world or criticize its disconnect with tradition, social scientists and religious scholars can examine it to learn about ritual in process. How does this kind of ritual creativity appear and evolve as a cultural phenomenon? Who has the authority to create and adapt the rituals? How do the ritual actors establish their own authority and that of their rituals? And what do these new rituals tell us about the nature of ritual itself, and its contemporary manifestation in the West? I agree with Talal Asad that a universal and therefore transhistorical definition of ritual,10 religion,11 and in this case also of spirituality is not viable because religions, rituals, and spirituality are deeply embedded in the societies producing them. The elements that constitute them are historically specific; they tend to change over time in a constant relationship with social and cultural changes. As

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a result, contemporary forms of pilgrimage and ritual can provide a perspective on current social and cultural changes. We cannot assume that pilgrimage and ritual have followed fixed patterns in the past and that only in recent times have people started creatively appropriating and changing them. In fact, historical and anthropological studies about vernacular Catholicism12 and Christian pilgrimage13 suggest that in the past as in the present Christian lived religion, ritual and pilgrimage are heterogeneous and changing phenomena.14 I am particularly interested in the dimensions of religious and social critique embedded in the new forms of pilgrimage and ritual and their relation with gender and power. The pilgrimages seem to appear as sequences of rituals designed to empower the pilgrims, especially women, offering new embodied experiences of femininity and different female models. To register this process of gradual empowerment, the life narratives of the pilgrims before, during, and after the pilgrimage are particularly important. The pilgrims’ life stories and their commentaries about their pilgrimage experience reveal the variety of meanings attributed to Mary Magdalene and the ideological and mythological background of this kind of pilgrimage. Following the example of Élisabeth Claverie in her study of French pilgrims to the Marian apparition shrine of Medjugorje,15 I want to understand how the pilgrims describe themselves, how they judge themselves, and why they end up accepting certain theories, creating specific rituals, and describing them as healing experiences. As we will see, they do so after a complex process of testing during which they rely on certain capacities such as intuition or feelings, which they then analyze according to a complex system of correspondences. The outcome of this process determines whether a certain theory or technique is considered effective and useful and is therefore incorporated into the pilgrim’s worldview and everyday practice. But before further addressing theory and method, let us turn again to the pilgrims and the saint they seek.

The Route of Mary Magdalene Mary Magdalene was a controversial figure right from the beginning of Christianity.16 She is the only woman in the canonical gospels who is named without being associated with a man (her brother, husband, or father). From the first centuries onward, Christian authors confused her with other female figures of the gospels and tried to find a male figure she could be associated with. The four canonical gospels do not say much about the saint: after Jesus casts seven demons out of her, she becomes one of his disciples and stays at his side during the crucifixion. She is then the first person to see the resurrected Christ and to

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announce this to the other disciples. Mary Magdalene is therefore called apostola apostolorum, apostle to the apostles. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great declared (A.D. 591) that Mary Magdalene were one and the same person with Luke’s sinner (Luke 7:37–38) and Mary of Bethany (John 11:1–2 and 12:1–3), who both anoint Jesus in different episodes of the Bible.17 In this way Mary Magdalene became the sinful sister to Martha and Lazarus; the repentant prostitute healed and saved by Jesus’s intervention. Only in 1969, with the reform of the Sanctorale, was Gregory the Great’s confusion officially rejected by the Vatican. Most Catholics, laics, and clerics continue to consider and revere saint Mary Magdalene as the prototype of the repentant sinner.18 As for Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus, it is mostly a passage from the Gnostic gospel of Philip (NHL 1978:138) that has fired the imagination of theologians, philosophers, and writers. In this controversial and incomplete passage, Jesus is said to kiss Mary (supposedly Magdalene) often on her mouth.19 From the 1980s onward, as the apostola apostolorum, Mary Magdalene became an icon of feminist theology championed by Catholic groups advocating the right of women to become priests. Feminist theologians20 interpret the transformation of the first apostle into a prostitute as the ultimate expression of the minimization and denigration of salient female figures in the gospels in the history of Christianity. Books and theatre plays presenting Mary Magdalene as the sexual partner of Jesus began to spread by the end of the nineteenth century.21 In 1910 the German poet Rilke translated and published an anonymous manuscript found in Saint Petersburg, apparently dating from the eighteenth century, entitled L’amour de Madeleine. In the following years Auguste Rodin sculpted two works representing Jesus and Magdalene as lovers, and in 1931 D. H. Lawrence published a story titled Man Who Died, describing the love story between Jesus and a pagan priestess.22 In the 1950s the French royalist Pierre Plantard and others collaborating with him created false documents attributing a divine ascendancy to the French crown, and demonstrating Plantard’s descent from Jesus and right to the French throne. Their work culminated in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), which purported to present the hidden truth that its three authors had discovered in some secret dossiers in the French National Library, thanks to the hints from the French author Gérard de Sède, who collaborated with Plantard. The dossiers23 and the genealogies they contained showed how the descendants of Jesus arrived to France and later formed the Merovingian dynasty. The dossiers also provided evidence for the existence of a hidden movement founded in 1066 by Godfroi de Bouillon called Prieuré de Sion.24 The great masters of this order (including Plantard) had been important figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon. Over the centuries the members of the Priory supposedly had attempted to reestablish a divine monarchy by placing one of

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Christ’s descendants on a European throne. The members of the Priory of Sion were also the guardians of the Holy Grail, and one important leader of the order was the Grand Master Saunière, a French abbot of the French village of Rennesle-Château who restored the local church dedicated to Mary Magdalene during the last decade of the nineteenth century by filling it with cryptic symbols associated with her secret role. Influenced by De Sède’s writings (1967), Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln say in their book that the Grail is not a chalice, but in fact the body of Mary Magdalene, which once contained the Sangraal or Sang réal (royal blood) of the descendants of Christ. One of these descendants would have married into the Merovingian dynasty and Christ’s descendants might still be around today (Plantard among them), secretly trying to rule over Europe. As a result, Rennes-le-Château has become a major focus of attraction for followers of the Sangraal theories, and for all those still searching for the secret treasure Saunière claimed to possess.25 After 1982 many books appeared whose authors took the theory of the Sangraal (or parts of it) for granted and focused on the figure of Mary Magdalene.26 Some of these authors described their own journeys to places on the route of Mary Magdalene27 and their spiritual experiences at various sites. Modern versions of Pilgrim’s Progress,28 these books recount an inner and an outer journey that usually culminates in a major change in the author’s life. The most important places linked to Mary Magdalene described in this kind of spiritual-esoteric literature29 are all related to Christian legends about the saint’s arrival in Gaul, her travels and her remains. According to a legend popularized in the Middle Ages by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1260), following the crucifixion Mary Magdalene and some other Christians set sail (among them Maximin, Lazarus, Marta, Sara, and the two Marys, Maria Jacobé and Maria Salomé). They arrived in a boat at the current French coast at a place that would thereafter take the name of the Holy Marys of the Sea, or Les-Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer. After preaching in Marseille and converting the inhabitants of what is now Provence, Mary Magdalene retired to a cave in the mountain of La Sainte-Baume and lived there for thirty years in contemplation, without eating or drinking, and being lifted up to heaven by angels seven times a day. Before dying she asked Maximin to give her extreme unction, and was then buried in the church of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, where her remains are on display today. Every year, Catholic pilgrims, mostly French, visit these places30—but it is difficult to establish when the alternative, non-Catholic pilgrimages began. The forest of La Sainte-Baume is considered a sort of magical place in popular French tradition, and French Catholic pilgrims have told me that in the 1970s and 1980s there were meditation groups and Hare Krishna disciples who settled in the area. As we will see, many places that form part of the route of Mary Magdalene, such as Chartres or Rennes-le-Château, have been a center of attention for

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French esotericism or have attracted the curiosity of travelers because of the legends that surround them.31

Goddesses, Witches, and Shamans In order to understand the theories, ideals, and rituals of Magdalene pilgrims, one must first be acquainted with the major religious movements from which these derive. Sabina Magliocco has defined Neopaganism as “an umbrella term for a variety of religions that draw inspiration from elements of pre-Christian polytheistic worship.”32 This definition allows the inclusion of movements such as the different traditions belonging to the Goddess movement, feminist spirituality, and neoshamanism. These movements share a concern about ecology and for the protection of what they identify as Mother Earth. Calling themselves witches, shamans, or priests and priestesses, Neopagans claim roots in ancient pagan religions practiced by their European and American ancestors. Neoshamans mostly refer to the ancient and contemporary shamanic traditions of the American indigenous cultures, whereas witches and other Neopagans more linked to the Goddess movement and feminist spirituality tend to refer to a secret magical lineage that allowed the survival of pre-Christian religious practices. They believe that before the Christian Era there existed in Europe a generalized cult around a major feminine divinity, venerated with different names according to places, but essentially referred to as the Goddess. Influenced by the theories of the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and later authors analyzing ancient mythology,33 they believe that there existed a widespread cult revering a feminine divinity throughout Europe and Mediterranean Asia. Civilizations practicing this cult are believed to have been matriarchal and peaceful and underwent major changes as a consequence of Indo-European invasions (4500 b.c–2500 b.c.), bringing about a patriarchal system of social structure and religion.34 Influenced by Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), Neopagans consider the medieval witch cult as a continuation of a pre-Christian fertility religion and see themselves as modern practitioners of an ancient female-centered religion that survived Indo-European invasions and later Christianization.35 This is changing in recent years, especially in the United States, where Neopaganism has received increased scholarly attention since the early 1990s and there are well-established Pagan study groups and conferences. As I could see in 2010, during what is probably the largest Pagan convention, the Pantheacon, there is an ongoing debate among Pagans around the historical evidence of Gimbutas’s matriarchal period and of Murray’s theory of continuity. The rise of Neopaganism and the Wicca movement in particular can be traced to the writings of Gerald B. Gardner and his book Witchcraft Today (1954). This

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English civil servant claimed to have been initiated into a secret coven of witches that pertained to a long-lasting magical tradition dating back to pagan times.36 Gardner’s work fostered the diffusion of Wicca traditions in Britain and the United States.37 The beginnings of neoshamanism can be traced to Aldous Huxley’s experiments with mescaline in the 1950s and later to the successful writings of Carlos Castaneda from 1968 on. Some neoshaman ideals are shared by dissident psychiatry, where the indigenous shaman is seen as a precursor of modern psychiatrists. Anthropologist Michael Harner is the founder of so called core-shamanism that offers Western practitioners a wide range of techniques derived from different shamanic traditions and adapted to the cultural and social needs of the West.38 Each so-called native tradition has a particular master with whom its neoshamans identify. The neoshamans themselves are either Westerners who claim to have been apprenticed to indigenous shamans, or locals describing themselves as natives or semi-natives who claim to have inherited their shamanic wisdom from their family or ethnic group.39 Practitioners of contemporary neoshamanism mainly refer to what is identified as the Native American tradition, but there is also a minor current, particularly developed in Britain and France, that refers to Celtic shamanism. Influential authors on the latter subject are Caitlin and John Matthews, who have written several books about the Holy Grail, Celtic shamanism, and Arthurian legends.40 Galina Lindquist points to the fluid character of neoshaman groups (and more in general of contemporary spirituality), referring to the heterogeneity of theories and practices adopted and the relative lack of competition among different groups.41 Urban neoshamans in Sweden make a reflexive use not only of ethnographic and religious studies sources but also of historical knowledge about their Norse ancestors. During my time among neoshaman practitioners in Barcelona, I noted a sort of “pan-Indian”42 vision of so-called Native Americans, as if there were a shared cosmovision among indigenous groups living in the Americas. Natives were seen as guardians of nature and of the Mother Earth, and the practitioners drew parallels between American pre-Columbian societies and European prepatriarchal societies. Both pre-Columbian and pre-Indo-European societies were seen as peaceful matriarchal societies where women and men had equal rights. Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims considered indigenous people as the guardians of Mother Earth, and borrowed theories and ritual gestures from them in order to create their own rituals. Two of the three leaders of the pilgrimages I participated in had been apprenticed to spiritual teachers who claimed to have received their wisdom directly from indigenous shamans from Peru and Mexico.43 Drawing respectively upon the Mexican neo-Conchero movement44 and the Andean tradition popularized by the Peruvian anthropologist Juan Nuñez Del Prado,45 Italian and Iberian pilgrims made their offerings to Mother Earth and claimed their right to transcultural borrowing.

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Gaian Pilgrims and Goddess Pilgrims In line with the theories about the sacrality of Mother Earth and the importance of contacting and venerating Her, a different kind of pilgrimage developed.46 In the late 1970s spiritual travelers appeared on the scene who visited places they considered sacred and powerful to meditate there and make use of their energy.47 Concerned with ecology, these pilgrims saw the Earth as a living being that needed to be protected from humanity’s pitiless exploitation and revered as it was once by the ancients, and still was by indigenous people. There began to be organized trips to sacred places and centers to welcome them. These travelers often defined themselves as pilgrims, and their trips as sacred journeys or pilgrimages. The cultural geographer Adrian Ivakhiv studied two of the major pilgrimage sites visited by these “ecospiritual pilgrims”:48 Glastonbury in Somerset, England and Sedona in Arizona. Inspired by James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), “Gaian pilgrims”49 considered the Earth a sacred feminine being and described certain places as the “Earth’s theophanies.”50 Influenced by Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track (1925) and other later books referring to it, Gaian pilgrims believed that the Earth is crossed by lines of energy (“ley lines”) that form a big web.51 The points where two or more of these lines cross were considered very powerful and known by the religious specialists of different ancient religions who built sacred monuments upon them. People visiting these places could benefit from the energy there to get healing and insight. As the result of the spread of this kind of spiritual traveling, in the early 1980s guidebooks appeared that presented the powerful places across several countries and offered information about meditation centers, vegetarian restaurants and spiritual retreats. A Pilgrim’s Guide to Planet Earth; A Traveler’s Handbook and New Age Directory is an early example.52 As Ivakhiv has shown, Gaian pilgrims “consider themselves part of an emerging New Age of spiritual and ecological awareness” and reject the disenchanted vision of the world that science offers them.53 Coinciding in some cases with the counterculture movement, they oppose capitalism and globalization, instead proposing an alternative eco-spirituality. When visiting sacred places, these pilgrims sit and meditate or use energy techniques to tap into the healing influences of the place, and sometimes donate their own energy to the site. In doing this they aim to empower themselves but also to honor Gaia, Mother Earth.54 They consider their behavior in contrast to man’s general attitude of exploitation toward the planet, and believe that meditation and the projection of positive thoughts contributes to healing the Earth. Although there are said to be powerful places throughout the world, some sites particularly attract Gaian pilgrims, like the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians and Mayan and Incan archaeological sites. In Europe, Gaian travelers are

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attracted to Gothic cathedrals and prehistoric stone circles like Stonehenge. All these structures are thought to have been built at powerful places, according to the rules of a secret geomancy. According to Fulcanelli’s theories in Le Mystère des Cathédrales et l’interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du grand œuvre, later recovered and further developed by Louis Charpentier in his book on Chartres cathedral in 1966, certain orders of masons (Christian geomancers), particularly linked to the Order of the Knights Templar, built most of the Gothic cathedrals using their secret knowledge of telluric currents and astronomy. “Goddess pilgrims”55 attracted by archaeological sites in the Mediterranean area have several things in common with Gaian pilgrims, but are more focused on feminist issues. They visit places related to what they identify as ancient matriarchal cultures to worship the Goddess through dancing, chanting, and particular rituals in places where She was venerated a long time ago.56 In Leila Castle’s 1996 book Earthwalking Sky Dancers; Women’s Pilgrimages to Sacred Places, different women from the Goddess movement talk about their personal journey into the Sacred Feminine to places all over the world. In the foreword, Riane Eisler, one of the most influential authors of the movement recounts an experience she had in Austria: I had stopped at the village for dinner on the way to Vienna where I was born, and on impulse I had decided to drive up the hill to look at the sunset before dusk. The church was small and baroque, white with carved wooden portico. What intrigued me was the sign on it:“Frauenkirche.” A Women’s Church. At that time I was still on the threshold of the journey of exploration that eventually led me to The Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure, and other works reclaiming our lost Goddess heritage. But I already knew that if there was a church on a high place called Women’s Church, it must be on a very ancient site: a site dating back to a time when women were priestesses and the powers that govern the universe were not yet imaged only in male form. As emerges from Eisler’s account, not only pagan temples such as those in Turkey, Greece, Malta, or Italy57 may be used to connect with the Goddess’s power, but Christian churches as well.58 She and others hold that especially those churches built on high places and those with names referring directly or indirectly to the Sacred Feminine were constructed at sites where pagan temples were once dedicated to the Goddess. Women from the Goddess movement reclaim these sites and perform pagan rituals there that are thought to derive at least in part from ancient pre-Christian traditions. Observers59 have emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing this kind of pilgrim from tourists in general, and in the past years there has been an ongoing discussion about the increasing secularization of pilgrimage.60 Particularly in

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the case of pilgrims traveling in organized groups such as those described by Rountree,61 similarities with tourist groups visiting the same places are striking. Unlike Catholic pilgrims, Goddess pilgrims consider physical pleasure to be an important part of the pilgrimage and criticize the division of the spirit and the body that they ascribe to Judeo-Christian patriarchal schemes. For this reason they prefer to travel in air-conditioned coaches and eat in good restaurants while visiting archaeological and historical sites and museums.

Mary Magdalene’s Pilgrims Mary Magdalene pilgrims share the basic theories of Gaian and Goddess pilgrims but their interest focuses on power places appropriated by the Church that are related with the hidden part of the Christian tradition Magdalene stands for. Most leaders of organized tours following the route of Mary Magdalene did not specialize only in Magdalene-spirituality, but also led tours to other sacred sites such as Machu Picchu, the Mayan pyramids, or Glastonbury. Many of the Magdalene pilgrims I spoke to had already traveled to other sacred sites on their own or with an organized group. Some of them even stated that ever since they had discovered a new way to relate to Mother Earth as a living being and benefit from the power of each place, every trip ended up being a spiritual journey. They arrived at a new place and began to “feel” it. If they felt comfortable with its energy, they used the energetic techniques they had learned in previous workshops, mostly drawn from neoshamanism, to receive it. At some point in their lives, these pilgrims had felt drawn to visit the places related to Mary Magdalene as part of what they called their quest for the Feminine, the Goddess, or simply “darkness.” They began to speak about this with friends and to read related books until they finally decided to set out on a personal quest. Even though Magdalene pilgrims shared many ideals with what they called the New Age, most of them did not identify themselves with these words.62 The negative stereotype that pilgrims had about New Agers was that the latter did not really engage profoundly in a spiritual way of life, but were mostly just curious. They did not really grasp the deep meaning of the books they read or the workshops they attended, and just looked for an easy way to achieve peace, relaxation, and well-being. From the pilgrim’s point of view, even though the New Agers might be doing similar things, their approach and the level of their interest and commitment was different. In this context, characteristics ascribed to the New Age were used as a kind of negative identity that allowed pilgrims to define themselves by contrast.63 Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims were aware of the fact that New Agers were sometimes seen and criticized by people outside the movement as middle-class, self-indulgent Westerners who chose a kind of spirituality that allowed them to

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do and believe whatever suited them best. By distancing themselves from what they defined as New Age, many pilgrims dodged these charges and asserted their profound commitment to spirituality. Some pilgrims even explained to me that New Agers used techniques, rituals, and forces they did not really know and control, and in doing so actually did harm to sacred places. An American pilgrim who lived in France told me that she and her husband had been cleaning sacred places from the energetic remains left over from previous activities done there. In contrast to New Agers, she and her husband were known as “lightworkers,” like others around the world. These people knew exactly how to deal with energy and were cleaning sacred places worldwide. Yet there always remained doubts among the pilgrims about this differentiation, emphasized particularly when visiting places strongly linked to the New Age movement like Glastonbury in England or Rennes-le-Château in France. Sometimes the ambivalent relationship with the New Age was referred to with a sense of humor. At some point on the 2004 pilgrimage, Dana, the leader of the Spanish-Catalan group, stated ironically in a mix of Catalan and Spanish: “We can’t get around it, we are New Age!” It seems that in the last decade the term New Age, at first used by natives, is now used almost exclusively by social scientists.64 I have tried to respect these pilgrims’ and other’s refusal to be labeled New Age and to find other terms perceived by them as more neutral. In the case of Magdalene pilgrims I found that the term referred to most positively was that of spirituality. It was used when speaking about ideals, books or workshops and was especially useful to describe those pilgrims who did not belong to a particular witchcraft or women’s group, and who shared a commitment to feminism and ecology that was linked to, and lived through, the worship of the Goddess and Mother Earth. Even though there were differences by nationality, pilgrims shared a basic ideological background that was similar to English witchcraft groups65 and Neopagan groups in the United States,66 or in Australia67 and New Zealand.68 Magdalene pilgrims saw the witches in the Middle Ages, as well as knights like the Templars and heretics like the Cathars, as forerunners who had been persecuted and killed by the Church because they secretly venerated the Goddess. Eager to connect with their spiritual past, pilgrims felt particularly attracted to archaeological sites of pre-Christian temples and to places linked to the Cathars and the Templars. They inspected the Christian shrines for signs that indicated the covering up of pre-Christian symbols connected with the energy of the place. Most pilgrims had a Christian background and found in Mary Magdalene a figure who allowed them to combine their chosen ideals related to spirituality with those they had involuntarily received from their parents. The metaempirical beings the pilgrims described and referred to as most important were the Goddess and Mother Earth. But the other important supernatural

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beings they venerated were mostly drawn from the Christian pantheon. Embracing ideals of ecofeminism,69 pilgrims considered that the exploitation of the planet was one expression of a more general exploitation and domination of women. Humanity was destroying the planet because it followed male-oriented principles of conquest and progress, disregarding the conserving and nurturing aspects related to the feminine principle. Stating the importance of “rediscovering the Religion of the Earth,” Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, two influential authors on Goddess spirituality, wrote: “Based in matricide, the death of all nature, and the utter exploitation of women, Western culture has now run itself into the ground, no other way but to return to the Mother who gives us life. If we are to survive we have to attune yet again to the spirits of nature.”70 Magdalene pilgrims were concerned about ecology and felt that if things did not change this would bring about the end of humanity. They considered human destructivity toward nature as the consequence of an ongoing disregard for the feminine aspect. The pilgrims felt that their honoring the Goddess and visiting places where her presence was particularly strong helped to empower them and to attune with Mother Earth, to honor and worship Her. The power of these places derived from their particular location in the landscape (following the theory of ley lines) and was often signaled by the presence of a special spring, mountain or lake in the area. Recognizing these natural signs of the power of the sites, different cultures had created stone circles, dolmens, temples, or churches there. According to the pilgrims, in ancient times the Goddess had been revered in such sites and should still be honored today. Again, the concepts of the Goddess and Mother Earth overlapped. The Goddess manifested her power and should be revered as She had been in the past in those very places where Mother Earth’s power was particularly strong. Many pilgrims identified in Mary Magdalene a figure that allowed them to combine the Catholic symbols, figures, and rituals they had received from their families and social environment with the spirituality they had chosen to make their own. Apart from specific theories about Mary Magdalene, pilgrims shared a common view about humanity’s past and the rise and development of Christianity—theories which derived mainly from the transnational Neopagan movement. What these pilgrims wanted was to restore what they identified as the hidden part of Christianity, which according to them had been removed from orthodox Christianity but had been an authentic part of its origins. They believed it could be reintegrated by reclaiming the Sacred Feminine and the theories and rituals associated to it.71 Magdalene pilgrims also held that the rise of Christianity had reduced the autonomy and rights of the pagan women of the Roman Empire and of later Christianized countries.72 Considering Christianity as the expression of patriarchy, pilgrims distinguished between the authentic message of Jesus73 and the use the Church made of it. They wanted to purge the Christian tradition from its

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patriarchal elements and interpretations, rescue the true teachings of Jesus, and restore them to their original meaning. In this context Mary Magdalene belonged to both the patriarchal and the feminist system and was described with ambiguous traits.

Spirituality, Religion, and Religious Criticism In the past decades, scholars assessing the increasing popularity of alternative spiritualities and the decreasing influence of traditional forms of religion (and especially Christianity) in Europe and Northern America have remarked a shift from religion to spirituality.74 Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead have put to test the theory of a spiritual revolution in the United Kingdom (with some references also to the United States); they concluded that statistical data do not confirm that we are facing a revolution on a religious level but that there has been a visible cultural change.75 They argue that the decline of institutional religion and the growing of spirituality might be an expression of the “massive subjective turn of modern culture” theorized by Charles Taylor76 and others.77 Scholars studying alternative spiritualities in Europe and Northern America78 have distinguished between religious persons, recognizing a transcendent authority outside the self, and spiritual people, focusing on the inner self as the ultimate authority. However, both the religion/spirituality divide as well as that between external and internal authority tend to replicate the internal discourses of alternative spiritualities and in fact very often these theories are based almost exclusively on the analysis of texts and discourses. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which alternative spiritualities are themselves socially structured and how the dimensions of gender and power are addressed in terms of practice.79 As Wood has observed,80 the focus on a common idea of self-centeredness and self-authenticity risks imposing unity where there is diversity.81 In the case of the pilgrims I accompanied there was certainly a recurring reference to the importance of being true to oneself, following one’s inner voice, and not giving away one’s authority to external institutions or entities. These issues were not as central as observed by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in The Spiritual Revolution (2005), however, and emerged especially when criticizing established religions. As Courtney Bender has observed, sociological analyses of spirituality in the United States (and, one might add, in Europe as well) tend to “focus on individuals and draw most exclusively on individual-level data (interviews and survey methods),” and present spirituality “as an individual project, brought forth by the conditions of a society that values the individual.”82 But as we will see, an ethnographic approach to spirituality shows spiritual practitioners constructing their theories and practices in a continuous exchange with others.83

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Rather than self-reference, the two main features that I found to be characteristic of the pilgrims’ spirituality were the constant use of an energy discourse and the importance of ritual creativity. The notion of an all-pervading life force identified as energy was the basis of most of the pilgrims’ theories and practices. Ritual creativity allowed them constantly to live out their spirituality and feel directly the existence of energy through which the divine forces were manifested and could be contacted on a physical level. Other relevant elements of their spirituality were a gender-centered critique of the current historical situation and the importance given to direct, embodied experiences of the sacred.84 The pilgrims postulated a revolution of Christianity in the literal sense of the word, turning upside down its fundamental dogmas and rituals. This revolutionary mechanism emerged from their discourses, but also through the form in which they organized their rituals. One part of the ritual derived from the Christian tradition, for example, and was creatively adapted through references to indigenous rituals that were held to have maintained certain pre-Christian native features deriving from civilizations such as the Incas and the Aztecs. The pilgrims I came to know wanted to oppose a Christianity they perceived as a coherent, monolithic belief system following classic social science theories of religion. In their critique of religion as a universal concept, they did not distinguish between dogma and practice. Talal Asad85 argues that the universal definitions of religion and ritual offered by social scientists were the product of a particular historical discursive process much like the religions and rituals they try to define. In recent years different scholars have stressed the importance of studying religious phenomena as lived experiences in constant change rather than stable and coherent belief systems.86 The pilgrims on the contrary had a stereotyped view of established religions, especially Christianity, and seldom took into account that lived religious experience has always tended to be in dialectical contrast with orthodoxy. Throughout the centuries Christians—whether theologians, visionaries, spiritual entrepreneurs, or everyday believers—have manipulated religious theories, symbols, and practices; they have generated often-contradictory discourses, negotiated with religious institutions, and created new ways to define and contact divine forces in ways not so different from those of the pilgrims.87 Even if in the pilgrims’ discourses their spirituality was opposed to religion, their spiritual practices were strictly connected with Christianity. They constructed their spirituality almost in opposition to what they perceived to be religion, but in this process of construction they inevitably remained dependent on their very concept of religion and on Christianity. In this sense they ended up having much in common with the heretic groups they considered as their predecessors such as the Cathars, the Templar Knights, or the Rosicrucian who criticized Christian orthodoxy and proposed a different, more authentic access to the Christian message.

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Ritual Creativity Pilgrims readily admitted that they had created their rituals by mixing together elements from different traditions. From their point of view this did not compromise the ritual’s potential or actual power. They felt that their rituals had been created by receiving inspiration and visions from the past, with the clear intent to obtain a ritual structure that, while not identical, was equivalent to previous rituals. Pilgrims created tripartite rituals following Van Gennep’s structure88 and postulated that the aim of pilgrimage was to experience a state that, as we will see, had many things in common with the Turners’ “communitas.”89 In referring to the pilgrims’ rituals, I apply the word “ritual” broadly to those spiritual practices that were identified as such by the pilgrims themselves and were meant to establish a contact with metaempirical beings and obtain insight, empowerment, and healing. As we will see, the rituals were not repetitive and stereotyped but rather created ad hoc for each situation. In order to establish and describe their relation with their goddesses and gods, these pilgrims created their own vocabulary and semantics by adapting terms taken from different religions. They profited from the traditional meanings and the original force of these terms but reinterpreted them to fit their own worldview. Celso, the Italian pilgrimage leader, and Dana, the Spanish pilgrimage leader, used ritual elements drawn from the European versions of two neoindigenous traditions, the Andean and the Conchero, respectively. Both knew that these traditions had themselves reinvented many indigenous rituals, and reinterpreted the theories and symbols they claimed to be authentically native. But this did not represent a problem for the leaders. They emphasized how effective the neo-indigenous theories they drew upon were, but claimed that in order to be accepted by Westerners the original indigenous theories and practices often needed to be adapted to fill in what they referred to as the cultural gap. The processes of transcultural borrowing that underlie most neoshaman practices are complex.90 My intention here is not to judge this procedure of appropriation and reinterpretation by non-natives of native symbols and rituals, but to describe what appears to be the final product of a long chain of processes of appropriation and transformation. Any analysis should bear in mind that religious traditions of even greater antiquity often derive from the appropriation and adaptation of elements from previously existing religious systems, and that this appropriation often involves processes of domination and violence. Scholars such as Talal Asad and Catherine Bell91 have shown that not only rituals but also the way we theorize about ritual are strictly related to historical processes. If the world “rite” was used in the eighteenth century to describe a script including exact instructions about the ritual actions and the texts to be read, later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the same word came to describe “behavior.”92 The pilgrims’ ways of ritualizing involve a further step

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away from the script dimension of ritual. For them, ritual no longer implies an exact routine, but rather a loose notion of a general structure to be followed and a set of shared assumptions about the meaning of this structure on a symbolic level. The rituals were for the pilgrims not instrumental, but symbolic, and the rituals’ efficacy did not depend on the exact execution of gestures but on the symbolic effect attributed to them. This passage of the conceptualization of ritual “from discipline to symbol”93 is clearly related with the symbolic turn in the study of ritual evident in the texts of anthropologists such as Victor Turner, Stanley Tambiah, and Clifford Geertz.94 Even if the pilgrims did not know these authors and their theories directly, they had read books whose authors have been influenced by them. In the last part of her book Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997), dedicated to ritual change and the invention of ritual, Catherine Bell observed the influence of earlier religious scholars such as Arnold Van Gennep, Mircea Eliade, and James Frazer and also more recent ones such as Clifford Geertz or Ronald Grimes. She points out that Victor Turner especially is an academic referent for ritual specialists, particularly those not belonging to a specific ecclesiastical tradition. Rituals understood in this sense emerge as vehicles “to create and renew community, transform human identity, and remake our most existential sense of being in the cosmos.”95 Bell admits that her own texts might also have been influential in this processes of ritual creativity, and that a self-consciousness of the functions and effects of ritual may now be part of ritual creativity.96 This awareness about the effects of ritual and the priority of its symbolic dimension is also evident in the pilgrims’ description of pilgrimage as a rite of passage. In emphasizing the importance of symbolism in the pilgrims’ rituals I follow Victor Turner97 in thinking of the ritual symbol as “the smallest unit of ritual.” As in the African rituals described by Turner, the ritual symbols referred to by the Magdalene pilgrims served to unify apparently disparate meanings and condense a multiplicity of ideas and theories.98 Pilgrimage emerges as a series of ritual actions and symbols whose efficacy no longer depend on a stereotyped set of gestures to be carefully replicated. By the same token, for these pilgrims the notion of physical effort and penance has declined in importance.99 Attending to these new forms of ritualization allows us not only to better understand these new forms of pilgrimage and their related spirituality, but also brings insight as to the shifting paradigms of religiosity and ritualization in the West. When ritual scholars are taken seriously their theories are used to create new rituals that are held to be as (or even more) effective than traditional ones. Ritual for the pilgrims I accompanied was indeed “a powerful ideological arena in which symbolic images and gestures exercise[d] a particularly persuasive effect on the participants sense of identity and social reality,”100 but this kind of approach can only be effective if one includes the influence of anthropological texts themselves on the pilgrimage leaders and the pilgrims. Given the fluidity of the pilgrims’ rituals, it is analytically useful to consider ritual as a way

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of acting, rather than a set of unique acts.101 In Bell’s terms, the Magdalene pilgrims’ ritualization sometimes “addresses a situation, namely, the experience of a contradiction between the cultural order and the conditions of the historical moment.” But the pilgrims would not agree with her when she says that ritualization “does not see what it does to this situation, which is to redefine it,”102 for they are fully aware that they are redefining situations. Bell103 draws in her analysis of ritual on Foucault,104 and particularly on Bourdieu’s popular concepts of practice, habitus, and milieu.105 Following Élisabeth Claverie’s analysis of French pilgrims traveling to Medjugorje106 and along the lines of French pragmatic sociologists,107 I do not regard social actors, in this case the pilgrims, as passive victims of the social milieu they grew up in or of the theories related to the spirituality they had embraced. Criticizing Bourdieu’s approach, Luc Boltanski and others like him hold that it is the human being that creates the society, and not the other way round. Social actors are not passive receptors but are equipped to engage with and be critical of reality; before accepting beliefs and rules, social actors challenge them.108 Hence I was particularly interested in the way pilgrims related to certain theories and ideas and the process that led them to accept or refuse them in establishing a personal set of theories, behaviors and ritual actions.109 The pilgrims’ creative ritualization informs their spirituality and their way of learning about a world order in opposition to what they describe as the patriarchal order of their upbringing. Through their rituals the pilgrims create, experience, and test out a different possible world. During the rituals they also embody new gender structures, and bodily sensations as well as emotions play an important part in their process of ritual transformation. The emotions the pilgrims mention, in Asad’s words, “are not universal human feelings” but rather “historically specific emotions that are structured internally and related to each other in historically determined ways.” As such “they are the product not of mere readings of symbols but of processes of power.”110 Therefore the attentive analysis of the pilgrims’ narratives about their bodily sensations and emotions, in the context of their life stories, allows us to better understand not only individual processes of ritual healing but also the mechanisms of social critique and of power negotiations inherent in these new forms of ritual. Unlike certain scholars reluctant to study new modalities of ritual action, I do not believe that ritual necessarily excludes experimentation and creativity;111 in fact, as we can see from the historical analysis of the Christian Eucharist,112 many if not most rituals are in their contemporary form the outcome of a long process of experimentation.113 Both ritual and religion can only be understood if we can grasp the historical and social conditions in which they were created. What makes the pilgrims’ forms of pilgrimage and ritualization particularly interesting is that one can observe a process of religious and ritual creativity in the making, listening to ritualists who self-consciously engage in this creative process.

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About Fieldwork and Methods My fieldwork among Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims began in November 2002, when I accompanied two Catalan women to La Sainte-Baume, Saint-Maximinen-Provence, and Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. In the summer of 2003, after spending some time living in the hostel of La Sainte-Baume, where I talked with Catholic and Magdalene pilgrims, I went on an Italian-organized pilgrimage. In 2004 I accompanied a Spanish-Catalan all-woman pilgrimage drawn from a wider set of women called Goddess Wood, based in Barcelona. Members of Goddess Wood were spread all over Spain, and some of those from the Barcelona region gathered every month to celebrate the new moon. During the following two years I regularly attended their gatherings. Because I also wanted to observe pilgrims who did not have as evident a Catholic background as those of the Italian and Catalan-Spanish groups, in Autumn 2005 I joined an Anglo American Magdalene pilgrimage. One of the main difficulties researching these pilgrims was that pilgrimages lasted from three to ten days, allowing little time to familiarize oneself with the group, grasp their worldview, participate in their rituals, and establish a longer lasting contact with some of the pilgrims. In the few days I passed with the pilgrims I struggled to find time for writing down my experiences. Sharing a room with one or more pilgrims meant that every moment was densely packed with sensations, information, and doubts. Each pilgrimage was an ephemeral and unique experience, as the participants did not generally know each other before. The group existed as such only for the duration of the trip and only some of the pilgrims stayed in touch with others afterward. I introduced myself to the tour leaders and the pilgrims as an anthropologist doing research about the way people currently perceived the figure of Mary Magdalene and visiting places they felt as being related to her. As others have noted, in this kind of fieldwork it is difficult for the observer to maintain her status as an outsider, for the social actors she studies soon treat her as like-minded and her colleagues soon suspect her of going native.114 The three leaders and almost all pilgrims treated me not as someone studying them, but as one of the group. They considered my study as part of a greater project related to the spread of theories about Mary Magdalene that human consciousness needed and desired in that historical moment. As I knew most of the places we visited as well as the local language, I often ended up acting as an assistant guide or translator as well. Subsequent to the end of organized pilgrimages, I stayed in touch with and interviewed some of the pilgrims I had had the opportunity to know better. Most Italian and Iberian pilgrims did not feel ready to speak about their experiences immediately after the pilgrimage, while pilgrims from the Anglo American group insisted on beginning the interviews during the bus trips.

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I contacted the pilgrims again several months after the first interview to see if there had been changes in their perspectives on the pilgrimage, or changes in their lives generally that they attributed to Mary Magdalene or to their pilgrimage experience. As I wanted to pay special attention to the specific terms pilgrims used to describe Mary Magdalene and their own theories, and this required analyzing interviews in five different languages (Italian, Catalan, Spanish, English, French), I decided to tape the interviews. Only one pilgrim preferred not to be taped, but she allowed me to take written notes while listening to her. Like others doing research on contemporary spiritualities,115 I am convinced that in order to understand the religious practices of persons who refuse to identify with a particular religion and embrace spirituality it is necessary to know them well over time.116 So-called Westerners may have a lifestyle and a social and educational background similar to that of many Western social scientists, but quite different approaches to experience and interpretation. In the course of her study of spirituality in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Courtney Bender soon had to acknowledge that contrary to her assumptions, she and her respondents did not share the same “sense of the world.”117 In my case, I found another reason why intensive and prolonged fieldwork was indispensable. Many pilgrims were well aware of common criticisms of their spiritual practices, whether as narcissism or spiritual capitalism,118 and were quite cautious about sharing their spiritual experiences. Only when they saw that I respected their religious choices and had genuine interest in their experiences did they become more open with me. Some pilgrims asked me to change their names; all who chose to have their first name included in this text signed releases. I have omitted all but a few of the pilgrims’ family names and changed most first names. When I was allowed to maintain a person’s first name I have marked it with an asterisk when first introducing the person. I also contacted some authors who had written books about Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s companion for interviews, and two of them accepted. I wanted to know about their religious backgrounds and their personal relationship, if any, with the metaphysical being of Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, these authors offered me a ready-made discourse containing only those ideas and theories that were already available in their published books. The only author who agreed to share her spiritual experiences with me openly and to tell me about her life was Lara Owen, author of a book about the spiritual meaning of menstruation. During the interviews with pilgrims I did not use a questionnaire, as I had a clear idea of the most important issues I wanted to discuss with them. I therefore allowed my interlocutors to talk freely about their pilgrimage and life experiences, only intervening from time to time to redirect them toward relevant themes. One part of the interview was related to their religious and political

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backgrounds. I tried to find out about the books and workshops they had liked the most, and about people who might have influenced them in regard to religion and spirituality. I wanted to discover if there were particular turning points in their lives for their distancing themselves from their Christian upbringing and for their taking an interest in spirituality. After the first interviews, it became clear that there was often some relationship between experiences linked to the person’s sexuality and her body and her perception of the pilgrimage and of Mary Magdalene. Where it was possible I therefore tried to discover more about women’s relationships to their menstrual period and about men’s and women’s striking experiences linked to their sexual lives. I found that some pilgrims talked openly about intimate experiences and problems, as they were used to sharing processes learned from former workshops linked to self-development. Because of this, they revealed cases of sexual abuse, feelings of guilt or shame related to sexuality, and even incestuous relationships. I presented myself as an anthropologist, but Iberian and Italian pilgrims did not always know what exactly an anthropologist’s work consisted of. Anthropology departments only exist in some universities in Italy and Spain, and anthropologists are still fighting for social visibility. Things were different for Anglo Americans, who viewed anthropologists positively and even thought that I would begin to interview them straightaway upon meeting them. When transcribing the interviews I had to choose which words to capitalize. Taking into account the critical approach most pilgrims had toward Christianity and the political use they sometimes ascribed to capitalized words such as Goddess, Mother Earth, or Sacred Feminine as opposed to Christian terms such as God, Holy Father, or Holy Spirit, I have chosen to capitalize those terms. Whenever the sources were written I obviously left the original spelling and emphasis. I paid close attention to the pilgrims’ social and cultural backgrounds, and their past experiences related to religious beliefs. I selected some life stories with features recurring in several pilgrims’ lives and others that helped explain the wounds the pilgrims were trying to heal in their sacred journeys. I also tried to report the stories of a range of pilgrims according to age, educational background, and social status. When they started out on the pilgrimage, the pilgrims brought with them a personal set of experiences and theories. Their narratives about their past allow us to better understand their experience and interpretation of the pilgrimage in terms of their personal spiritual evolution. Biographical narratives, of course, are the product of construction and interpretation, and the pilgrims themselves often acknowledged that they had come to remember and interpret an event in a certain way in the light of a past spiritual experience or something they had read. As with life stories, so too the ways people tell about rituals are the product of a complex process of interpretation. The Magdalene pilgrims’ intentions,

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experiences, and analyses of rituals help us to understand how the rituals work and how participants creatively transform the sequence suggested by the leader. Ronald Grimes observes that “there is no good reason to exclude ritual narratives, especially when participants themselves tell autobiographical stories as a way of making sense of a rite. It would be poor scholarship to overlook such data. Since people tell personal stories about passages, their accounts constitute a legitimate part of the meaning of the rites. Stories about passage are not mere reminiscences. Sometimes the telling and retelling become extensions of the rite itself, stretching it from the original performance in the past until it touches and transforms the present.”119 These pilgrims combined figures from a Pagan and Christian pantheon and created, together with their leaders, rituals that were a bricolage of elements from different religions and cultures. The leaders’ discourses appeared to be crucial in establishing the pilgrims’ symbolic universe; the pilgrims did not accept the discourses passively, but instead created their own patchwork pilgrimages in which the leaders’ theories served as a basic frame for inserting their own elements. The Magdalene pilgrims knew the sequences of their practices and rituals and how and why they were supposed to work even before doing them. Following Michael Houseman,120 I considered these newly crafted rituals as an occasion to better understand the nature of rituals, their origin, development, and further crystallization. I have described the most important rituals in detail, trying to take into account the fact that they had been modeled on certain anthropological theories about rites of passage121 and psychological, mainly Jungian, theories about the power of symbols and archetypes. During the fieldwork, I soon realized how influential certain texts were for the pilgrims and their leaders. The leaders of the three organized pilgrimages often read aloud from books during the trip, and pilgrims were constantly sharing and comparing the ideas from texts they had read. For this reason, throughout the text I cite from what I term the pilgrims’ spiritual-esoteric literature to offer insight into the way influential authors from this area constructed their discourses and helped the pilgrims to create a new vocabulary and semantics. Moreover, these excerpts from the pilgrims’ spiritual bibliography allow us to see how authors of spiritual bestsellers present and construct their arguments and to gauge these authors’ influence on the leaders’ and pilgrims’ strategies of construction and interpretation. Although not all pilgrims had read all the books I cite, the ideas and concepts in the citations were generally part of the cultural repertoire of these pilgrims, and most especially of their leaders.122 As in the case of their leaders’ teachings, the pilgrims made a critical and creative use of the theories in these texts; this creativity is particularly evident in their approach to The Da Vinci Code and its theories about Mary Magdalene. I also paid special attention to the pilgrims’ process of learning.123 Unlike Catholics or Muslims starting out on a more traditional pilgrimage, Mary Magdalene

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pilgrims were not subject to a particular standard behavior and did not have a set of rules and prayers established throughout the centuries to refer to. They had to learn what it meant to be a pilgrim through the process of becoming one itself, discovering gradually what one was to do or to expect along the way. Like Tanya Luhrmann studying Christian Charismatic groups in the United States,124 I found that contrary to what I had expected it was not so easy to learn to believe in God (or the Goddess), experience the divine in one’s life, and to trust these experiences. Despite the fact that attitudes toward the New Age, Neopaganism and feminist spirituality have softened and much serious research has been done over the past twenty years, many social scientists still maintain a critical and defensive position toward these movements because of the borrowing from native cultures and the use of ethnographic descriptions and anthropological theories to create rituals. Joan Prat125 argues in his research about new religious movements in Spain that as anthropologists we should approach new religious groups neutrally, treating them as seriously as if we were studying the monks of a major Marian shrine like Montserrat or a native group in the Amazonian rainforest; We should treat them with respect, objectivity, and openness to hearing what they can tell us about spirituality, ritual, and ourselves. Neopagan movements such as neoshamanism or feminist spirituality deserve to be studied with the same detachment and scrupulous attention as other religious movements, and with careful consideration of the range of differences existing among them. In the same way that conclusions drawn or statements made about a Catholic parish in France cannot automatically be applied to an Anglican group in Great Britain simply because they both profess their faith in Jesus, the conclusions one could draw about a group of Goddess worshippers in Spain cannot be automatically applied to a group of neoshamans in the United States simply because both of them honor Mother Earth.126 The great majority of pilgrims I studied were women, and their ages ranged from twenty-five to seventy-two. I sought variety by age, social background, and marital status. Few of the pilgrims were men, but I managed to speak at length to four men out of a total of six on the pilgrimages I attended. The two men I was unable to interview described themselves as novices, and both had a rather skeptical attitude toward the trip. Interviewing was not always easy. It was particularly difficult to explain my role as an anthropologist to the Spaniards, Catalans, and Italians and to gain their confidence. Since they had been criticized and mocked for their spiritual beliefs, the pilgrims who came from areas with a strong Catholic influence such as Catalonia, Spain, and Italy only gradually shared their experiences. Most of them agreed to be interviewed in depth only several months after the pilgrimage, saying that they could not speak about such an intense experience right away and needed to gather, ground, and process their feelings and changes. They

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emphasized at the end of our talks that they would not have told me the same things earlier because they were not aware of them. I ascribe the enthusiasm of the English-speaking pilgrims for my project to the fact that in the United Kingdom and the United States, spirituality is more developed and accepted than in Spain or Italy. Both Spanish and Italian pilgrims noticed with a certain relief that from the year 2000 onward there had been an increasing openness in their respective countries to spirituality. Italian pilgrims, in particular, described their difficulties during the late 1980s and the 1990s in getting others accept their alternative interests and ideas. Given these pilgrims’ fear of being criticized, attacked, or offended by someone coming out of a discipline most did not know well, I used very open questions, avoiding anything resembling a survey. Other pilgrims were more knowledgeable, but no less cautious. This uneasiness toward the academic world and the rigid analysis of beliefs ascribed to it was clearly expressed by one Catalan pilgrim, who cited critical remarks by the Moroccan anthropologist, Fatima Mernissi,127 about social science questionnaires. Finally, a brief note on how I refer to the pilgrims’ theories and practices. As an ethnographer, I have made an effort to distinguish between what people were doing and the supposed meaning of their actions. But insisting too much on my position as an observing social scientist and the repeated use of distance markers such as “in the leaders’ terms,” “from the pilgrims point of view,” “supposedly,” and so on interrupts the flow of the narrative. I have therefore tried to use these distance markers when first introducing a theme—for example, energy techniques or past lives—but avoided their excessive use.

The Structure of the Text The text is divided into eight chapters exploring the phases before, during, and after the pilgrimage, so that the reader follows the same sequence as the pilgrim.128 The first chapter introduces the pilgrims and leaders, their pilgrimage routes, and their cultural and spiritual backgrounds. It focuses also on what happens before the pilgrimage, describing the pilgrims’ decisions to participate and the doubts and obstacles they encountered. The second chapter explores the ways in which pilgrims learned about the rules and meanings of pilgrimage. In the first gathering of the groups, it will be seen that each leader had a different approach to and characterization of Mary Magdalene. The pilgrims’ comments and expectations at this point related to shared theories about past life experiences, the archetypal influence of gods and goddesses, and the importance of Native American shamanism. In chapter 3 the pilgrims visit La Sainte-Baume, where the leaders introduce the different mythological strata of the place and notions of sacred geography.

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The pilgrims felt the forest of La Sainte-Baume, where Magdalene is said to have lived, to be replete with spirits of nature and zones of restorative energy. The pilgrims understood this and the other sites visited in terms of a world constituted by energy, and they used energy techniques in order to receive light, positive energy, and to shed what they called heavy or negative energy. Pilgrims used this energy terminology to reinterpret Christian practices of penance and elevation, and to relate to Catholic shrines as places of power. Chapter 4 shows how the figure of Mary Magdalene helps to resolve the tension between the pilgrims’ Christian (predominantly Catholic) pasts and their present spirituality. The pilgrims seek to reassert their rights to the places of power that the Church has appropriated, and tell of their negative experiences within Christianity in this or in past lives. Chapter 5 takes up the centrality of menstrual blood for many pilgrims, and the corpus of theories about menstruation that they rely upon. They hold Mary Magdalene to be closely linked to menstrual blood, and the chapter describes in detail two rituals of offering menstrual blood to Mother Earth. The following chapter addresses the pilgrims’ descriptions of Mary Magdalene as a wounded healer who helps women and men overcome traumas related to sexual abuse, incestuous relationships, abortion, or operations on reproductive organs. Chapter 7 explores the pilgrims’ notion of “darkness,” and analyzes the way in which the Iberian pilgrims created and celebrated a rite of passage for menopausal women. The last chapter describes the final part of the pilgrimage and the return home. Here the pilgrims’ ideas about pilgrimage are compared with current anthropological theories. The final section of this last chapter is dedicated to describing changes that occurred in the pilgrims’ lives after their return home. In the conclusion, I consider the new pantheon of goddesses and gods created by the pilgrims, their ritualization strategies, and the political dimension of their claims about the sacrality of the body and the centrality of menstruation.

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“Going to See Mary Magdalene” Starting Out on a Pilgrimage

After her divorce in 1995, Maria Antònia,* a Catalan woman in her early fifties, was tired of being, as she put it, the “superwoman” she had learned to be growing up in a conservative Catalan family in a rural area during the Franco regime. She had been taught to confront all kinds of difficulties, but only by totally denying her “femininity.” Deep inside of her she perceived that joining a pilgrimage and contacting Mary Magdalene would help her to get in touch with “her own woman”. Antònia described the kind of happy anticipation before the day of departure of the pilgrimage in 2004: “Going on a caravan of women, as some people were calling it . . . I loved the name. A caravan of women to go to see Mary Magdalene, like a romería,1 you know, a pilgrimage, this is what it really was” (June 4, 2005). Like Antònia, other women from Europe or the United States every year set out to contact Mary Magdalene, whom they consider the ultimate expression of femininity. Sometimes men too embark on this kind of quest, curious as to what Mary Magdalene can allow them to find out about themselves and their own “feminine side.” Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, La Sainte-Baume and SaintMaximin-en-Provence are the central places for the Mary Magdalene pilgrimages, and all the pilgrims I spoke to had visited them (see maps 1, 2, and 3, which show the complete itineraries of each pilgrimage group I accompanied). In the introduction we have seen that in the Voragine legend Mary Magdalene had lived for thirty years at La Sainte-Baume, whence seven times a day angels lifted her to heaven. At the top of the mountain, where legend has it that the angels collected Mary Magdalene, there is a little chapel called Saint-Pilon. Pilgrims visiting this site slept at the Hôtellerie de La Sainte-Baume, a cheap and quiet place run by nuns near the small village of Le Plan d’Aups. The hostel is situated on an esplanade at the foot of the mountain called La Sainte-Baume which is covered by a wood (see figure 1.1). Half the way up this mountain is the Magdalene cave and a small convent with Dominican friars. Starting from the 29

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Figure 1.1 La Sainte-Baume. The Dominican convent that has been built around the cave’s entrance is at the border between the woods and cliff, and the small chapel of Saint-Pilon is atop the mountain. Photo by Eric Charpentier, with his permission.

Hôtellerie, pilgrims could easily visit the town of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, where Magdalene’s supposed relics are kept in the crypt of the basilica (see figure 1.2). Finally, in Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, some two hours drive from La Sainte-Baume,2 pilgrims could see the beach where the boat landed with Mary Magdalene and other Christians fleeing from Palestine (see figure 1.3). In the fortified church of the town, which is dedicated to Mary Jacobé and Mary Salomé, the two Maries who according to legend arrived with the Magdalene, the pilgrims were particularly attracted by the dark statue of Sara. Saint Sara was held by the Roma to have been a local princess, by the Catholics a servant of the holy Maries and by those who shared the Sangraal theory the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.3 During my fieldwork I accompanied three organized groups: one starting from Italy in 2003, an exclusively female group starting from Catalonia in 2004, and finally a group of English and American people who started their tour in Marseille in 2005. I also traveled with some Spanish, Catalan and American women doing their pilgrimage independently in 2002 and 2003. Talking with the pilgrims, I soon found that each had a slightly different idea about what it meant to be on a pilgrimage. People traveling in small groups or on their own did not use the term “pilgrimage” so much, and when they did they emphasized that for them, a pilgrimage had the

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Figure 1.2 Pilgrims from Roger Woolger’s group enter the basilica of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence. Photo by Anna Fedele.

meaning of initiation and was not necessarily linked to Catholicism. This need to differentiate themselves from Catholic pilgrims was rarely felt by group pilgrims, whose non-Catholic approach was continuously reaffirmed by their leader’s explanations and their spiritual practices. They felt themselves clearly different from Catholic pilgrims and also from other people visiting these same places, whom they labeled as tourists. During the interviews I paid particular attention to the pilgrims’ life stories, the religious education they received through their family and what led them to read about alternative spirituality and eventually to attend workshops. I wanted to see if in their life stories there were common patterns of turning away from the Christian religion they were raised in or similar events leading up to their interest in the neoshaman and feminist spirituality movements. It turned out that what Margot Adler observed about Neopaganism, calling it “a religion without converts,”4 equally applies to the Magdalene pilgrims I interviewed. As it emerged from their life stories, we cannot talk about a conversion of these pilgrims to spirituality: They became gradually involved in spiritual theories and practices and did not feel themselves to be members of a specific religious movement.

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Figure 1.3 Spanish and Catalan pilgrims on the roof of the fortified church of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Photo by Anna Fedele.

The Slow Shift Toward Spirituality The first pilgrims I made contact with in 2002 were women who had decided to start out alone or with friends, attracted by the figure of Mary Magdalene. They wanted to experience the places in Southern France where the saint was said to have lived and they used their own cars to get to the places, sleeping in cheap hotels or hostels. In November 2002, I accompanied Encarnación5 and Gloria on their first trip to the Sainte-Baume, Saint-Maximin, and Les-Saintes-Maries-dela-Mer. Encarnación’s story shows many similarities with those of other pilgrims and offers a good example of a former Catholic’s gradual approach to spirituality. This rather small and fragile-looking woman with big blue eyes and very fair skin was normally called by her nickname, Encarna. Since we first met she wore her hair tinted a reddish color and normally dressed with colored jewelry and elegant shawls. She had two daughters, was divorced in 1997, and since then had lived in the family house with her younger daughter. Encarna had been born into a village near Almería in 1951 as the fourth out of seven children in a peasant family. She arrived in Cornellà (a village which now forms part of Barcelona) at the age of twenty with a sister, and some years later married Alberto, the son of Andalusian immigrants. Encarna began to get interested in spiritual matters shortly before her divorce. She said that without the spiritual sustenance she

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had received from the group of the Course in Miracles6 at that time, she would probably not have been able to get through it. Before asking for a divorce, Alberto confessed to Encarna that he was the father of his secretary’s daughter, who was already six years old. Encarna thought that Alberto would never have asked for divorce if he had not seen that his wife had gotten stronger because of the workshops she attended. During the year before the divorce, their elder daughter was operated on for ovarian cancer. Thanks to workshops centered upon sacred femininity Encarna learned to interpret her daughter’s disease as a consequence of her own conflict with femaleness and the constant tension with her husband. When Encarna began to go to workshops and read books about spirituality, she noticed that her family was relieved to see her happy for the first time in years. Her relationship with her daughters changed, because Encarna felt that she could tell and show them interesting things and that it was not only her husband they listened to. During her elder daughter’s illness, Encarna prayed a lot, and for the first time in her life she trusted that there was a divine force helping her. She prayed most of all to Jesus and used techniques from A Course in Miracles. At first Encarna talked to everybody about her new spiritual discoveries, seeking to share something that had helped her so much. But then she noticed that her family and friends began to get bored and she learned to distinguish the people with whom she could share this kind of subject. After her divorce she lost her and Alberto’s common friends and in their place made new ones, who could “resonate with her” and share her interests and her quest. One of these friends, Gloria, accompanied her on her first trip to the Sainte-Baume in November 2002. Encarna and Gloria enjoyed the pilgrimage and shared their spiritual adventures with friends who had similar interests. In May 2004, Encarnación went back to the Sainte-Baume with Maria Rosa* and another friend. Both of them had listened to Encarna’s enthusiastic account of the previous pilgrimage and had insisted on her joining them for a new trip to France. Maria Rosa’s gradual shift to spirituality bears many similarities to that of Encarna and other Spanish and Catalan pilgrims born in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Encarna, Maria Rosa had picked up from her father that women should not give in to sexual desire and even had to hide their beauty and sex appeal in order not to attract and mislead men. This blond woman with blue eyes in her late forties remembered having psychic experiences as a child. Raised in a Catholic Catalan family, Maria Rosa had started reading books about Buddhism in her teenage years. Like Encarna, she found her way to spirituality by trying to solve problems related to her daughter: When her second child Laura was born with learning disabilities, she had to stop working and went from one alternative therapist to another for relief for Laura and for herself. After several years of trying out different therapies and attending workshops, in the year 2000 she herself opened a practice where she gave spiritual advice based on kinesiology,

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Reiki, and cromotherapy.7 She gradually specialized in numerology and created personal numerological charts based on the client’s birth date and complete name. When Maria Rosa met Encarna and heard about the Magdalene pilgrimage, she felt strongly attracted to the places described. In The Da Vinci Code, she found the key to understanding many intuitions and symbols she had received in dreams or during meditation, and she convinced Encarna to start out for another pilgrimage in May 2004. As we can see, the concept of self-awareness and self-authority emerges from both Encarna’s and Maria Rosa’s accounts when they describe their shift away from orthodox Catholicism and toward spirituality. In fact, to use Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead’s terms, they gradually learned how to pass from a life as wives and mothers to a “subjective life spirituality” based on their own authority and choices.8 But in their accounts references to a different way of conceiving their bodies, gender, and sexuality predominate. They emphasize the importance and difficulties of learning to get in touch with their emotions, their bodies, and sexual desire and rarely refer to an abstract entity such as the self. In addition to pilgrims from the zone of Barcelona traveling on their own, I accompanied three organized pilgrimage groups. In the following section I will briefly describe these groups and their leaders. The pilgrims from these organized groups had much in common with Encarna and Maria Rosa.

Celso Bambi* and the Italian Pilgrimage in the Summer of 2003 In 2003, there were only few tours related to Mary Magdalene advertised on the web and most of them were only loosely related to her figure. The Da Vinci Code had been published in the United States, but had not yet achieved great popularity in Europe by the end of that year. The book was published in Italian in summer 2003, in Spanish in late 2003, and in French only in 2004. Through an Italian email list, I received an announcement of a pilgrimage: The Magdalene, the Cathars and the Knights Templar—France July 26 to August 3, 20039 —From the pre-Christian cult of the Mother Goddess over to mysticism and the medieval esoteric chivalry. We will visit and make energetic practices in the places connected to the mythical trip of the Magdalene, to the Holy Grail, to spiritual alchemy, to the secret of Gothic cathedrals, to the Cathar and Templar movements. With the reevaluation of the female principle, many sacred places can be explored and experienced with a new approach discovering a geometry and a power that pushes us to open ourselves

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to inner dimensions. We will touch places that belong to the Route to Santiago of Compostela; it will be a pilgrimage through the time and the space of our Europe and ourselves, to find new visions and to open our hearts. During the trip, techniques of the seminars “Animus-Anima” and “Meet the Masculine and the Feminine inside us and outside of us” will be used. Celso Bambi is a naturopath who works with routes in sacred places in Italy and in Latin America, with Dreamworking [sic] and the imaginary world, energetic techniques, healing rituals. Celso Bambi organized and led workshops all over Italy and trips to Peru and Mexico. I knew this Italian spiritual leader from previous fieldwork about neoshamanism and had attended some of his workshops about the Andean tradition, a system of theories and techniques he had learned from a Peruvian spiritual teacher and anthropologist called Juan Nuñez Del Prado. With his white beard and curly hair down to his shoulders, Celso looked like an alchemist, his blue eyes shining smartly through his glasses. Celso’s conflictive relationship with Catholicism and his quest for a different form of spirituality offer an example of attraction and repulsion toward Christianity felt by pilgrims brought up as Catholics. Born in 1956, he grew up in what he described as a Catholic and conservative family in Sesto Fiorentino, a town not far from Florence. As far back as he could remember Celso had always felt attracted to spiritual matters, and at the age of fourteen he had already read through the New Testament several times. He received communion and confirmation and used to attend the activities organized by the local church until the priest sent him away by literally “kicking his ass,” as he told me. As a teenager Celso felt attracted to communist ideals, partly out of rebellion against the Catholic background of his family, but also fascinated by the Christian ideals of justice and solidarity. After high school Celso became a labor leader, and he moved to Rome after joining the Italian Communist Party. He called himself an atheist but never abandoned his spiritual quest, reading books about occultism and parapsychology and undergoing psychoanalysis with a Jungian therapist. In his early twenties he began to feel ill at ease in the Communist Party and decided to leave it. He started to go to meditation groups, read about Tantra, and later studied philosophy and education at university. During this time he had what he described as a Jungian grande sogno (great dream), seeing himself on a boat led by an elderly man in a immense lake he later identified as the Lake Titicaca. This man led him to meet a young veiled woman who was herself on another boat with an elderly woman. In 1979, he made his first trip to Latin America. Influenced by the readings of Carlos Castaneda, he was looking for an indigenous teacher, and he found one in

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Peru. This man was called Hernán Huarache Mamani; eventually Huarache Mamani became a well-known shaman based in Italy with several books published about the spiritual teachings he claimed to have received from mysterious members of a secret brotherhood in the Andes.10 Back in Italy, Celso wrote a pamphlet about the spirituality of Quechua people and organized workshops for this shaman in Italy. He finished his studies in education with a thesis on yoga, obtaining the Italian title of laurea.11 In 1982, he began to attend an Indian meditation group that had what he describes as “very strict rules on food and sexuality.” Celso recognized that during his life he passed from periods of intense sexual activity to periods of strict chastity. In 1984, he married a woman who joined the same meditation group and a few years later they had a son. After finishing university Celso studied as a herbalist, and opened a shop selling herbal remedies in a small town in Tuscany. Later he also studied and worked as a naturopath. During the 1980s, he often traveled to India to attend meditation retreats. After some years of working with Hernán Huarache Mamani, the two went their separate ways. Celso continued to travel to Latin America, either on his own or as a guide for spiritual journeys. He later founded a company that distributed organic food and natural remedies. In 1992 he left the Indian meditation group and shortly afterward separated from his wife. In 1998 he met the Peruvian anthropologist Juan Nuñez Del Prado, who called himself an Andean priest (sacerdote andino). Nuñez Del Prado claimed to have been initiated by a teacher from the Cuzco area whose spiritual heritage dated back to the Inca period and whose teachings apparently referred to divinities from Christian and pre-Christian times. This kind of blend fascinated Celso, who began to organize workshops in Italy for Juan and took Italian groups to Peru. By 2001 he had begun to do workshops and trips about the Andean tradition on his own. He sold his shop and dedicated himself completely to his seminars and spiritual journeys to Mexico, Peru, and France. The Italian pilgrims traveling in Celso’s group in July 2003 knew the leader from previous workshops on the Andean tradition, where they had learned energetic techniques that allowed them to connect with the forces permeating the cosmos. These techniques were used during the pilgrimage to connect to the energy of particular places or Catholic statues. Compared to the two subsequent groups that I traveled with, Celso’s was particularly influenced by neoshamanism, and he always linked his ritual practices in some way or the other to indigenous traditions from the Andean area. The group of fourteen Italians consisted of three men and ten women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-three, and one two-year-old child. Their tour lasted nine days and included places as far away from each other as Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Vézelay in Burgundy (see map 1). Celso’s pilgrimage was designed to allow participants to explore sites related to Mary Magdalene and to some of the Christian movements and shrines that contemporary spiritual-esoteric writers associated with her. The

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pilgrims traveled in three cars, one of which was a minivan for about eight people. The group was meant to keep together and the drivers of each car tried to stay close to the other two cars along the streets and highways, keeping in touch through their mobile phones. Pilgrims slept every night in a different twostar hotel and shared double rooms. Food and lodging were paid for through a kitty. Money for gasoline was paid separately for each car. The total cost of the trip per head was approximately 1000 euros, 300 of which went to pay Celso for his work as a guide. Meals were eaten together, mostly in restaurants. On some occasions people brought their own sandwiches and ate along the way. The Italian pilgrims were from the lower-middle and middle class, and most of them had attended Catholic private schools, which their Catholic parents considered to be better and safer than state schools. These primary and secondary schools were separate for boys and girls and were often attached to convents. Pilgrims described the schools as severe and austere. Some of the female pilgrims grew up in Rome where the presence of the papacy reinforced the power of Catholic moral and social rules. The average age of the Italian pilgrims was between forty and forty-five. Some of the pilgrims were teachers, most had been to university, and some worked as a second occupation as therapists using alternative healing methods. The youngest male pilgrim worked as web page designer, and was said to have created the first Italian pornographic webpage that allowed surfers to see some of the pictures for free. He was also the only male pilgrim I met that did not travel with a partner. The trip formed part of the activities of a cultural association12 created in 2001 by Celso and three other pilgrims who co-organized the trip: Gianmichele* (1956), his companion Luciana (1963), and Susanna (1960). Susanna, Luciana, and Paola, another pilgrim in her forties living like them in Rome, were the first women to graduate from university in their families. All three mentioned that their interest in spiritual matters and things other than getting married and having children was not understood by their female friends. Most of women in the group were unmarried and lived on their own. In the 1980s and 1990s it was far more unusual in Italy than in Great Britain or in the United States for an unmarried woman to move out of her parents’ home. Paola and Luciana were still living with their parents when they went on the pilgrimage. For Celso’s tour, each pilgrim had to join his association and sign a declaration attesting that he or she knew about the itinerary and physical difficulties the journey would imply, was in good health, did not take drugs or prescribed medication, and had medical insurance for the trip. Each received a detailed list of things needed for the trip, including notebook and drawing pencils. Celso also asked for volunteers to take charge of pictures, film, keep a travel diary, tape, transcribe the tapes, keep the kitty, clean, drive, and provide “therapeutic support” such as massages or energetic techniques.

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Women Only: Goddess Wood and the Pilgrimage of the Blood in the Summer of 2004 In Autumn 2003 I made contact with a group of women called Goddess Wood.13 The name referred to the need to replant the sacred woods and groves of the Goddess that had been cut down by the representatives of patriarchal religions, and therefore implied both a spiritual and an ecological purpose.14 The group’s official prospectus was as follows: Goddess Wood was created in February 2002 with the aim of offering to all women a place and structure where the rites of passage of female life and the sacred feasts of Mother Earth can be celebrated. Our objective is to bring up to the present our ancient feminine lineage in order to re-cognize ourselves as Daughters and Priestesses of the Goddess. Our method consists in working ceremonially in circles of women. In ancient times, the Goddess was honored in the woods. She was considered the feminine aspect of God or the primordial Uterus from whence everything came and to where everything returns. She was known to all the peoples by different names and adored under the moonlight . . . Her cult took the name of “Feminine Mysteries” and her priestesses honored her with rituals of healing, beauty and magical love. With the arrival of patriarchy, the sacred woods were burnt, the priestesses were murdered and women were reduced to slaves. The name of the Goddess was erased from the books and the shadow of her oblivion fell over humanity. After many centuries, today a new rising shines through. The Great Goddess, whose genesis still goes on, is reborn in our hearts and radiates her energy through the daughters who return to Her.15 Since 2002, these women have gathered at every new moon in Barcelona and a few other Spanish towns, and on every second summer they have made a “pilgrimage of the blood.” Every February, for the Goddess feast of Candlemas, they celebrated a rite of passage initiating new members as daughters of the Goddess and committed members as guardians of the Goddess. In August 2004, I went on a seven-day pilgrimage with them (see map 2). It was led by Dana, the founder of Goddess Wood, who was an Argentinean living in Barcelona. Like most of the leaders of these pilgrimages, Dana was initially somewhat protective about her past. She and the other two Catalan women who helped her to lead the pilgrimage were between forty-five and fifty years old. Dana was a tall woman with long brown curly hair and brown eyes behind big glasses. She wore long dresses or wide skirts. After years in Barcelona, she had practically lost her Argentinean accent. She had an intense life marked, like that

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of Celso, by an important political commitment and a complicated relationship with Catholicism. Born in Buenos Aires in 1954 in what was a turbulent period for Argentina, Dana was baptized and grew up as a single child in the midst of the leftist intellectual group of her parents’ friends. She convinced her mother, a psychologist, to let her receive first communion like the other children of her age, but proclaimed herself an atheist shortly after the ceremony. Dana received what she described as “an emancipated education.” She proudly told me that her first menstruation was welcomed with a family feast, and she started having sexual relationships at the age of fourteen. At that age she secretly entered the resistance movement against the government. In 1969, with her boyfriend Martin and friends, she distributed flyers to commemorate the second anniversary of Che Guevara’s death. Dana dropped out of school at sixteen and began to teach illiterate people in the poor districts of Buenos Aires to read and write. In 1972, the political situation radically deteriorated and Dana was put into prison and tortured, but finally was released. The political repression worsened, and Dana’s boyfriend was killed by soldiers, as was her best friend. Dana lived for two years as a clandestina, a “nonperson” without papers, sleeping in trains, until she managed to escape to Spain with a false passport. In 1975, at the age of twenty-one, she arrived in Barcelona without money or friends. Once she obtained Spanish nationality and had saved some money, she studied to become a graphic design teacher and worked ever since in an art school. By the end of the dictatorship in 1983 most of Dana’s Argentinean friends had died. Only a few had managed to escape into exile. In the late 1970s, at the most difficult times, Dana would go to pray to the Immaculate Conception. In 1978, she made contact through her mother with a Buddhist lama and began to meditate and read books about Buddhism. In the late 1980s she read the first books linked to feminist spirituality to be translated into Spanish. In 1992 Dana met Emilio Fiel, a Spanish spiritual teacher who had just brought ideas and rituals of the Conchero movement from Mexico to Spain and held workshops about American shamanism, the Christian tradition and Tantra techniques. After some powerful spiritual experiences of contact with Mary Magdalene during a Conchero ceremony in 1993, Dana started to lead workshops about female spirituality, the menstrual cycle, the Sacred Feminine in the Christian tradition, and what she described as “Taoistic” sexual techniques. During the 1990s “very few people in Barcelona knew about theories and rituals related to the Goddess,” Dana told me, and she had few participants in her workshops. Around the year 2000 things changed, and in February 2002 Dana founded Goddess Wood and organized the first Pilgrimage of the Blood that summer. In the summer of 2004 the second pilgrimage was announced with the following flyer: Mary Magdalene’s Path, 2nd initiatory pilgrimage of the blood. August 21–28, 200416

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Goddess Wood invites you to participate from the 21st to the 28th of August in the 2nd initiatory pilgrimage of the blood, traveling on Mary Magdalene’s Path. We will work with the feminine mysteries of menstruation and menopause, ritually following the footprints of the Guardian of the Blood: Mary Magdalene. We will allow ourselves to be guided by her energy and travel following her steps as a pilgrim, connecting with her legends, symbols and temples. We will carry out exercises of Ovarian Kung Fu to recycle the energy of the menstrual blood and to balance the process of the menopause. We will do Healing sessions and energy activation of the information present in our DNA and in our life-blood. Seven days of ceremonial work, visiting the places of power of Mary Magdalene in Occitania to restore from the feminine side the bonds between the Blood and the Earth, celebrating the Menstrual Initiations of First Menstruation and Menopause, and carrying out the Offering of the Blood to the Earth. The Initiations and the Offering of the Blood celebrate the woman’s ritual commitment to her menstrual blood, sacred materialization of the Vital Essence that allows the continuous renovation of the life of the human family. It allows the woman to die to her ordinary state of existence, to be reborn as a Guardian of Life . . . to offer to her time and her world the most beautiful thing of herself. It also offers us the opportunity to strengthen our bonds with the feminine, going together through the fundamental stages of our life as women in deep connection with our home: the Earth. The only indispensable requirement to participate in this pilgrimage of initiation is that the woman feels inside her heart the deep yearning to offer her Vital Essence to the Earth from the vital stage of life she is in, even if she no longer menstruates. A woman can identify in this way her interior call to participate in this pilgrimage. If you feel the call from the Goddess when reading these words, you are being intimately summoned. Do not hold back from coming, because She is the force that maintains the nipples erect, irrigates the body and readies the muscles, ready for the biggest leap. We welcome you with open arms. In the Spanish pilgrimage program, the centrality of Mary Magdalene was clear from the title and also the term pilgrimage appeared there. As in the case of the Italian trip, this was the second time the leader had guided such a journey to France. Mary Magdalene was identified as the Guardian of the Blood, and she and the menstrual blood appeared as the main elements of the trip in which pilgrims could ritually follow in her footsteps. Addressed only to women, the text clearly evoked the Goddess, who was only indirectly referred to in the Italian

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one. There was a strong emphasis about corporality, and the tone was personal, and welcoming. The rituals referred to were all in some way linked to blood, and the blood was in its turn linked to Mary Magdalene and to Mother Earth. There was also a reference to the yearning for connection, and the pilgrimage was described as a spiritual experience that involved a call from the Goddess in quite the same way as the call from God in Christian pilgrimages. In contrast with Celso, who preferred to speak about energy techniques, Dana explicitly emphasized the importance of rituals on the trip. Dana spoke in the first person, addressing women she had already worked with or others that might already know who she was. In Dana’s flyer, some kind of commitment toward the menstrual blood, Mother Earth and the Goddess were presented as a necessary condition, whereas the Italian text clearly showed that the trip was open to anybody, man or woman, who was interested. Compared to the other two groups described in this text Dana’s was the most clearly related to and influenced by the transnational Goddess movement and the corpus of theories and practices best described as women’s spirituality. By referring to menstrual blood as a vital essence Dana evoked an important issue in women’s spirituality. To counteract the idea of menstrual blood as something dirty that brings pain and loss of control into women’s lives and must be hidden, feminist spiritual literature and workshops teach women to discover menstruation as a sacred process. Referring to the four phases of the moon, they connect menstruation to the dark phase of the moon. The period is thought to foster interiorization and creativity, making women highly sensitive and therefore able to receive insights about what they need to change in their lives. Dana’s pilgrims were those who had to bring the most things as they cooked for themselves, slept in dormitories and one night even camped out. Apart from food, reusable plastic dishes and glasses, hiking shoes, sleeping bags and mats, they had also to carry a meditation pillow, a flashlight, an alarm clock, a rosary, a crochet hook and thread, a notebook, and a pen. There also was a secret item linked to the offering of the menstrual blood which they had to bring without telling anybody. Dana sent the women a questionnaire about their health and medications and advised them to get a European health card. Many of the twenty-four participants, who were aged twenty-four to fiftyfive, worked or had worked in education or social services, but there were other professions as well. Two women had recovered from periods of drug addiction and were under medication for HIV, and some others did not have stable jobs and lived in communitarian apartments or squatted in occupied houses. Half of the pilgrims had already participated in one or more of the Goddess Wood’s activities, a few as committed members, but others had never met Dana before. The trip was advertised on a Spanish website about spiritual journeys and workshops and through a mailing list.

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The starting point of Dana’s pilgrimage was Besalú, a small town near Girona (see map 2). Here the group decided how many cars would be needed and divided into car-related subgroups. Pilgrims slept in summer camp buildings, in shared bedrooms of twelve people, and passed one night on the beach. The fixed price for the pilgrimage was 175 euros, which included accommodation. Money for gasoline and toll roads was paid separately. Pilgrims had been invited to carry a lot of food with them in order to save money, and could cook for themselves in common kitchens. This method allowed women on a tight budget to save on food and left others free to eat at a restaurant if they wanted to.

Roger Woolger* and the Magdalenetour By the summer of 2005, the popularity of The Da Vinci Code had spread widely, and more and more tours related to Mary Magdalene had appeared on Englishlanguage webs. I wanted to join a group that had no strong Catholic background, but this was difficult because the tours offered to people from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were quite expensive. Eventually I made contact with Roger Woolger, a Jungian analyst known for his workshops and his book about past lives, who invited me to join his group for free. In June 2005, I attended a one-day Magdalene conference Woolger organized in London that featured some of the most popular authors of recent books related to Mary Magdalene17 as speakers. In October 2005, I joined Roger’s group of British and American pilgrims on their way from Marseille to the Auvergne and finally to Vézelay (see map 3). This notice arrived in a newsletter to those who had already participated in Roger’s activities: In Search of the Magdalene the Black Madonna and the Lost Goddess A French pilgrimage in the steps of the ancient Goddesses of preChristian and medieval Provence & the Auvergne guided by ROGER WOOLGER, Ph.D September 30–October 15, 2005—Invitation to a Quest. . . . From Magdalene Tours Join us this Autumn to explore the medieval mysteries of the Grail, the Black Madonnas of the Auvergne, Troubadour cults of La Donna and legends of Mary Magdalene. We will enhance our daily travels with medieval music and folklore, scholarship, companionship and enjoyment of all that the Camargue, Provence, the Auvergne and Burgundy still offer the senses . . . Roger Woolger is a lifelong student of religion and mysticism, whose great pleasure is introducing others to the civilization and culture of

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medieval France. He is a Jungian therapist and teacher, and originator of Deep Memory Process. As in the case of the Italian announcement, Mary Magdalene was not the only subject on this tour; she shared her supremacy with the Black Madonnas and the Lost Goddess. But these other entities were strongly linked to her because according to certain authors of recent spiritual-esoteric literature,18 Black Madonnas represented Mary Magdalene holding her child Jesus, and the saint in turn represented an aspect of the Goddess that had been lost because Christianity obscured her importance. The darkness of the statues was therefore interpreted not only as reference to Mother Earth but also to this process of Christian adumbration. This pilgrimage, of the three the one most promoted through the web, was intended for English-speaking pilgrims mainly from United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Most of the American pilgrims knew Roger from his workshops in the United States, whereas the British pilgrims had met him first at the London conference. Roger was a tall man with green eyes and short blond-brown hair. He was the oldest and most well known of the three pilgrimage leaders and had been part of the spread of alternative spirituality in England and in the United States. He was the only leader to hold a PhD and to have published two rather popular books (one coauthored with his former wife). As with Celso and Dana, his life had been a constant quest for a spirituality that would allow him to combine his attraction for Christian figures and teachings and his inner values. This strong but gentle looking man was born in England in 1944 “in a free-thinking household with a strong exposure to arts and music.”19 This household had but one parent, as Roger’s father abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth. Feeling rejected by the Catholic community, Roger’s mother, until then a practicing Catholic, stopped going to church. She eventually decided to send Roger to an Anglican school. Roger did not like the religious ideas he learned, but enjoyed singing in the school choir. During Roger’s childhood his mother became interested in spiritualism and attended spiritualist meetings, sometimes taking Roger with her. “Always an omnivorous reader and an autodidact,” Roger had already “dipped into Freud, Eastern religions, Gurdjieff and the occult” by the time he started university at Oxford. In religion, though nominally Anglican, he was “at that time essentially agnostic.” At age seventeen, while in the Pyrenees, Roger had a profound religious experience; subsequently he began meditating and praying regularly and was strongly influenced by Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy; The Bhagavad Gita; the Gospels; and The Imitation of Christ. During this period Roger toyed with the idea of becoming a priest but soon realized that this was not his path. After obtaining a PhD in psychology at London University with a thesis on the “mystical psychology of Simone Weil,” his “unhappy married life and depression”

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took him into psychotherapy with the “rather unorthodox Jungian analyst,” John Layard, who was also an anthropologist. Influenced by Layard, Roger went to Zürich in 1975 to complete five years of training as a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute. He then moved to the United States to practice and began “a careful study of recent developments in psychotherapy, notably bodywork, Gestalt therapy, psychodrama, Ericksonian hypnotherapy, and birth release work.” Influenced by Stanislav Grof and Morris Netherton, Roger began to use techniques learned from Netherton to help his patients release “past-life traumatic experiences,” which would come up when they were in a state of deep relaxation. He invited them to fully experience their past life as they saw it unfolding, eventually facing the end of that life, the death of the person they saw and identified as themselves. Roger began to use these techniques more frequently until over two-thirds of his practice entailed past-life work. At the time of pilgrimage, Roger was living and practicing psychotherapy in upstate New York and giving workshops and lectures in Europe, Brazil, and the United States. Compared with the other two groups of pilgrims, Roger’s was more influenced by Goddess psychology and past-life theories, two domains we will explore later. Roger’s pilgrims traveled in a coach in which navigation was made easy by the sensuous disembodied voice of the GPS-guided computer. Untroubled by maps and directions, food, sleeping bags or petrol stations, pilgrims could listen to troubadour music, read the articles and books suggested and provided by Roger, or simply relax and look out the window. They slept in three-star hotels and had breakfast and dinner together. For lunch they normally went in small groups to different restaurants or got a sandwich, as they wished. The tour cost $2,695 for twelve days, with another $900 for a three-day extension for those wanting to visit Lyon, Bourges, and Vézelay. The price covered accommodation in double rooms, transport in a rented coach, and entries to museums and churches, but not airfare to France or lunches. For the organization of the tour Roger relied on a French travel agency, with which pilgrims had to sign a contract for the trip. There were fourteen paying participants in Roger’s group, eight women and three couples, aged between fifty and seventy-three. Most came from the United States. Apart from Roger, leading the pilgrimage, and myself, doing fieldwork, there were also an assistant and one of Roger’s daughters, who worked as photographer and camerawoman. Professions and origins of the participants varied. Several belonged to teaching or caring professions. There was also an ex-priest of the Liberal Catholic Church (founded in 1916, not recognized by the Vatican) and an Episcopalian priest. Some were retired, and all but one of them had extensive backgrounds in spiritual matters. Some were psychotherapists or spiritual healers, others were training for these professions. Once they had signed up for the tour and paid a deposit, they received further information welcoming them and explaining what they needed for the pilgrimage.

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Three Leaders, Three Ways of Organizing a Pilgrimage Probably because of the different prices of the pilgrimages, the three tours attracted people with different income levels. Roger’s pilgrims were by far the best educated. Although I did not ask them about their economic situation, it appeared clear that with few exceptions they had no financial problems. In Celso’s group, most of the pilgrims held a laurea and had stable jobs that allowed them to lead a modest life. I heard several complain about the cost of the journey or about their salaries. Some of Dana’s group did not have university degrees, and particularly the younger pilgrims struggled to earn a living and be financially independent. This was the only group with pilgrims of low social status, for example, those who did not have secure employment or who were dependent on social security benefits. The comparatively low costs of Dana’s trip allowed these pilgrims to join the pilgrimage. The two women in the group who were recovering from drug addiction had the resourcefulness to be traveling with a van in which they slept and cooked. There were also pilgrims from other professional categories in Dana’s group, and she proudly pointed out to me that they included a doctor, a judge, and a university professor. The ages of the pilgrims in the three groups were quite different as well: the oldest leader, Roger, also had the oldest pilgrims, all over fifty. Celso’s pilgrims were all over thirty-five, and Dana’s pilgrims were on average the youngest, with one aged twenty-four and others in their late twenties or early thirties, although most were in their forties or early fifties. Most of the pilgrims learned of the pilgrimage when they received the announcement via ordinary mail or email. Some were handed a copy by friends, and others first heard about it attending one of the workshops organized by its leaders. Only Roger disposed of an elaborate web page exclusively dedicated to the Magdalenetour, and some of his American pilgrims found out about the pilgrimage browsing the web. The Goddess Wood had no web page in 2004, and Celso’s association had just a simple one with a brief description of the trip. Reading through these announcements, I was struck by the number of specialized terms in the text, which implied that people responding positively must have a set of shared notions. In fact, independent of their previous contact with the leaders, all pilgrims had a common background of concepts that derived from books, workshops, and discussions with friends. When the pilgrims first met, they already had a common vocabulary, a “lingua franca”20 that allowed them to begin to speak about abstract or even very personal issues before even knowing the name of the person they were talking with. According to the nationality and language of the pilgrim’s group, some terms or expressions (e.g., feminine mysteries, the secrets of Gothic cathedrals) were

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more present than others. On all occasions, they were used without explanation. It was assumed that everybody did know them and when I asked about their specific meaning, pilgrims looked at me as if I were making fun of them. They finally agreed to explain them to me when I told them that actually I did know what the term meant but wanted to know exactly what they referred to when they used it. I will consider these specialized terms in more detail when reporting the different situations in which they were used. Of the three pilgrimages in which I participated, the pilgrims on the Magdalenetour were those who came best prepared about the places to be visited. Roger Woolger’s website gave them plenty of information about the leader, his books and the activities he organized, and they therefore had the opportunity to do background reading before the pilgrimage. The detailed trip announcement on Roger’s webpage made it clear that the tour was open to everyone: “wanderers, worshipers or lovers of leaving.”21 No religious or spiritual commitment was asked for, but the themes treated clearly spoke only to a certain public. As we have seen, the three leaders had different levels of education that at the time of pilgrimage corresponded with different levels of fame and income. Roger, with a PhD, was the best known; he led workshops in different parts of the world and had created a method of past life regression that he had patented. Celso held a laurea in education and training as a herbalist and naturopath. Only since 2002 had he begun to make a living from the workshops and trips he led himself or organized for other spiritual teachers. Dana had not been able to attend university even if she had wished to; because Spain did not recognize her studies in Argentina as it was impossible for her to obtain the necessary documentation. Even when the Goddess Wood activities began to attract many women after 2002, Dana kept working as a teacher of graphic design. In his flyer Roger did not take a definite position when talking about controversial themes regarding Mary Magdalene. He raised the questions but left it to the reader to answer them. The tour was presented as a pilgrimage but also as a quest for the inner meaning of medieval mysteries, and triggered the reader’s curiosity and hunger for wisdom. A detailed itinerary with pictures of the most important places was displayed on this same website. His program offered an exhaustive reading list for the reader that wanted to know more about “the whole Mary Magdalene issue,” as one of the American pilgrims called it. Roger was the only leader who sent his pilgrims a reading list; its title was “Medieval France: an Annotated Guide to Books, Films and CDs” (see figure 1.4)22 Drawing on data from geography, literature, and history, this Jungian analyst described the continuity between the pre-Christian cult of the Goddess, the Middle Ages and finally the modern revival of the Goddess religion.

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Figure 1.4 Roger’s pilgrims in the bus. In the foreground is a reading area with books on pilgrimage and shrines. Photo by Anna Fedele.

The way he constructed the program gave a good example of his procedure of juxtaposing events from different historical periods and geographical areas, and linking them by a common reference to an hypothesis. This hypothesis was then assumed to be viable because of the evidence from different historical periods that pointed to it. This tautological procedure would have been familiar to the pilgrims from most spiritual-esoteric literature. Convinced that historical evidence about certain spiritual themes had deliberately been wiped out by authorities referred to by general labels such as “the patriarchal society” or “Christianity,” and deceived by the limits imposed by orthodox academic research, Roger and other authors like him were trying to find a new way to bring out the things hidden. Roger showed others what he felt to be true, basing himself on books by authors he resonated with and brought people to places related to these themes so that they might have their own experiences and find “their own truth.” These Magdalene pilgrims and their leaders tended to see scientific and rational methods as an expression of a mind-set that only uses its masculine side, and not what these pilgrims describe as an intuitive feminine side that often functions by association. Just as academics criticize the authors of spiritual-esoteric works for their unprofessionalness, the latter and the pilgrims accuse the scientists of being one-sided.

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Catholic Backgrounds Many pilgrims had a strong Christian background and most were brought up as Catholics. Some came from families with a constant Christian/Catholic practice they remembered from their childhood, others had even desired at a certain point of their lives to take religious vows, and some of them eventually joined heterodox Catholic movements. In the case of the Catalan and Spanish pilgrims, one cannot fully understand their life stories or their commentaries throughout the pilgrimage without considering the centrality of Catholicism to the regime of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975). During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) almost all Catholic bishops supported the nationalists in their crusade against what they identified as the “republican Antichrist” and considered the fight against the “diabolic” socialists, communists, and anarchists as a modern reconquest of the infidels. For Catalans, the situation was particularly difficult: they lost the relative autonomy they had obtained during the Second Republic (1931–1939) and saw their linguistic and cultural identity denied. As Felicia, a Catalan Goddess Wood pilgrim, pointed out, during the Franco era it was difficult for many Catalans to identify with Catholicism because it meant being part of an institution that had chosen the side of the oppressor. So when Catalan women spoke of the Catholic Church as the persecutor of innocent people they did not only refer to medieval witches or heretic groups, but also to the victims of the Spanish civil war. The military terms used by pilgrims (see for instance Estrella in chapter 3 in this volume) to refer to the Catholic Church’s attitude might well derive from this association. Almost all Spanish pilgrims went to convent schools, and as Estrella’s story shows, even younger pilgrims born toward the end of the dictatorial regime had still to struggle with the remaining Catholic vestiges. The somewhat darker tone of her skin, her long black hair, and the way she dressed in colorful skirts made Estrella look like a proud Roma. She herself admired the Roma and felt a strong connection with Saint Sara, their patron saint. She lived in a big flat in Barcelona that she shared with three other flatmates her age. Born in 1968 into a conservative and very Catholic family in a town near Tarragona, Estrella suffered from the macho attitude of her father and elder brother who made her feel that being a woman, she had to obey them. Every Sunday her mother would go to mass to fulfill a vow made when Estrella’s father nearly died from a severe accident. At the age of seventeen, Estrella moved to Barcelona to attend art school. During the next ten years she lived as a bohemian, going out every night and having many affairs. During that period she worked as a freelance photographer, doing several other jobs to earn a living. When she was thirty Estrella decided that she wanted to change her life and traveled to India with a friend. There she felt that she had “finally come home.” Since her early twenties, Estrella had been reading books on spiritual themes,

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attending conferences and learning to read the tarot. From the year 2000 onward, she began to participate in rituals with ayahuasca loosely linked to the church of Santo Daime,23 and in other seminars led by Latin-American neoshamans. Following the invitation of a Mexican woman known as abuela Margarita, Estrella began to offer her menstrual blood to the Earth every month. During the following years she participated in several courses of crystal therapy,24 attended the new moon gathering of the Goddess Wood regularly, and was initiated as daughter of the Goddess. When Estrella heard from Dana that Mary Magdalene could be considered the guardian of menstrual blood, she immediately signed up for the pilgrimage. Estrella felt excluded by her family, especially by the males, because of her rejection of Catholicism and her desire to live as an autonomous woman without a stable partner. Like Estrella, most of the pilgrims of all nationalities had abandoned the Christian belief system of their parents because they had felt judged and excluded by its strict moral rules about sexuality and the secondary role assigned to women, or had experienced its hypocrisy. Yet several pilgrims described striking and even mystical Christian experiences in their childhood: Roger while singing in the choir; Margot while attending the mass; and Immacolata, an Italian pilgrim described below, while visiting an aunt who was a nun. Even when disappointed and sometimes even offended and wounded by their contact with Christianity, these pilgrims still had a sense of trust in certain Christian figures and in the power of Jesus’s teachings. Several pilgrims had relatives who were priests or preachers or had particular psychic abilities, including premonitions, being able to read the tarot and foretell events, knowing magical inherited formulas, contacting the spirits or healing. All of the pilgrims interviewed maintained spiritual practices in their everyday life and were well acquainted with books and workshops related to alternative spirituality and Neopaganism. For some of these pilgrims, the process of distancing themselves from the Christian milieu in which they had been raised was gradual and rather smooth, and in the process of separation some of them felt accepted and often even supported by their families. Others reported a moment of transformation, whether related to health problems for themselves or their families, depression or sadness because of a separation, a spiritual crisis that led them toward beliefs and theories more related to feminist spirituality, or a need to break through from religious patterns of their family which they perceived as painful and denying women’s power and sexuality. The Italian pilgrims living in Rome tended to be especially guarded about their spiritual practices, as if afraid of the negative reactions of their families or of the possibility of negative consequences in the very capital of Catholicism. This was the case for Maria Immacolata, a rather small woman in her forties with short curly brown hair and brown eyes, whose strong voice, laughter, and Roman jokes made her popular among the pilgrims. Since her childhood, she had suffered because of her name and desired to have what she called a “normal” name instead

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of one that evoked her family’s origins in Southern Italy and Catholic religiosity. Named after her paternal grandmother, Immacolata felt that this name conditioned her whole life, even if most of the people knew her by a nickname. She grew up in Rome, went to a Catholic school for girls, and stopped going to church after leaving school. Immacolata had always felt attracted to esoteric themes but had not followed up on this attraction until recently. She worked as a clerk and lived in Rome on her own. During a hiking tour in 2000, she met Gemma, one of the Magdalene pilgrims, who introduced her to crystal therapy. They began to share books and attend workshops together. Even if she was no longer a practicing Catholic, Immacolata still believed in the power of Catholic religion and remembered moments of peace and serenity when, as a child, she visited a nun who was her grandfather’s aunt. She clearly felt that her spiritual interests might be perceived as being in contrast with her Catholic upbringing and emphasized that her parents did not know about her “parallel life.” It was particularly difficult to obtain information about the spiritual experiences of Italian, Catalan and Spanish pilgrims who were clearly not used to talking much about their spiritual lives. The fact that I too was from a Southern European country with a strong Catholic tradition may have made them feel more at ease.

To Be or Not to Be a Pilgrim When I set out for the Pilgrimage of the Blood in the summer of 2004, I had never met Dana, the leader of the group in person, and I did not know any of the pilgrims. Those women who did not have a vehicle had received the phone numbers of those who were open to taking other pilgrims in their cars. I called one of the numbers and made contact with Maria Antònia, the Catalan brought up to be a superwoman. We decided to meet at the train station of the small town along the Northern Catalan coast where Antònia lived. When I stepped out of the train with my backpack I found Antònia waiting for me and for two other Catalan pilgrims. She knew immediately from my accent that I was Anna, “La Italiana,” as I would be known for the whole journey. This strong-looking, warm-hearted Catalan woman with short brown hair, brown eyes and a deep voice received me with an enthusiasm I would learn to appreciate over the following days. The other two pilgrims, Isabel and Maria de la Soledad, known as Sol, had been looking for us; they had big backpacks and wore colored skirts, with hippielike shirts and jewelry. There was a general excitement among the three women, and they immediately began to talk about the pilgrimage, Mary Magdalene, and their energetic perceptions for that day. While piling the bags and food into Antònia’s car, the women kept chatting in Catalan, shifting to Spanish each time they remembered that although I understood Catalan, I did not speak it well. We drove toward Besalú, where we would meet the rest of the group at a restaurant.

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One of the first things my car mates began to discuss on the way was how and why they had decided to make the pilgrimage. The way these Magdalene pilgrims had found out about the trip, had thought about whether to participate or not, and had finally signed up, was considered a relevant issue that formed part of the pilgrimage itself. For as the pilgrims often told me and each other, nothing that happened was due to chance. For them every single thing that took place had a meaning behind it and was part of a sort of divine plan or plot. It was the task of each person to interpret the events she was going through, to understand their hidden message, and to deduce the bigger plan behind sequences of events. The events analyzed could be major ones, like the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, but also smaller ones that could seem insignificant to others, but were noticed as relevant by the pilgrim. This process of interpretation normally took place after an event, and helped the person to fully accept it and find its place among previous events, considering them parts of a long chain. Unable to predict where the chain would lead, one could at least understand why one had arrived at that particular point by analyzing the events leading up to it. Each pilgrim tended to be attentive to signs and signals, and often asked others to help interpret them. Listening to these Magdalene pilgrims explaining the reasons that brought them to join an organized tour or to set out with friends to visit Southern France, I was able to identify some of the decision-making processes. Sometimes more than one process applied to one person. Some pilgrims described their reasons for setting out on the pilgrimage as being based on personal interests, synchronicities, or particular problems they hoped to resolve thanks to the trip. Others did not know exactly what had made them decide; they had just felt attracted to it and had therefore decided to join.

The Decision Epiphany Traveling in Antònia’s car toward the pilgrimage rendezvous, the three women described the way in which they had received the pilgrimage prospectus, as well as their doubts and their difficulties in paying the inscription. Two of them highlighted the moment they had finally decided and called Dana, after having had the program lying somewhere waiting for them. For Antònia it was a girlfriend, a teacher like her, who had given her a copy of Dana’s email outlining the program for the initiatory pilgrimage. Her friend had been to some of the monthly gatherings of the Goddess Wood for the new moon and wanted to join the pilgrimage. Antònia told me: I had not been able to go [to the moon gatherings] myself but I always had wanted to go. She gave me a copy of the email, and there it was, on my table and I said to myself, one day I will call, but it was as if I was not ready. And one day, one day it was brutal, because I needed to call, I

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needed to pay . . . immediately! So I did that without speaking with my friend. This was in June. Dana asked me if I wanted to talk with her about my decision but I answered her that I had made up my mind and did not need to speak about it. (June 4, 2005) Antònia stressed proudly that she had made this decision without knowing whether her friend would join the pilgrimage or not. When she heard that her friend would not sign up, Antònia chose to go even though she did not know anybody. The two other women in the car, Sol and Isabel, thirty-one and twenty-eight years old respectively, were friends who shared a passion for belly dancing. Sol shared a vacant building with other squatters and sold her own handicrafts at markets. The month before the pilgrimage Sol had worked as a postwoman and had saved just enough money for the trip. When she received the announcement, Sol had left it somewhere in her room until one day she sensed that she really wanted to join the pilgrimage and she immediately called Dana. Like Antònia, Sol was worried because she had not been able to decide earlier, afraid there would be no places left. This process of instant decision making was described as a moment of epiphany rather than the result of long reflection. The women explained that at some point, when they felt that they wanted to go, they had had to act immediately. Their attitude contrasted with that of Isabel. Once Sol signed up for the tour, she invited her friend Isabel to do the same. The belly-dancing teacher described her decision in a nondramatic way, saying that she could not decide herself and therefore called Dana only some days before the start. She was put on a waiting list. Isabel thought that if it was important for her to go, then things would work out. After having shared their decision-making processes, the three pilgrims wanted to know how it had been for me. It soon became clear that every time some kind of experience was shared in a small group of pilgrims, the process would go on until every woman had shared her own experience. I told them that I had seen the email and immediately applied for it because I was writing a thesis about Mary Magdalene and was particularly interested in pilgrimages related to her. The women were impressed by the directness of my decision, and, using a Spanish expression, they observed that if I was interested in Mary Magdalene, then this trip suited me “like a ring on a finger” (como anillo al dedo).

The Group and Leader-Oriented Decision Later on the same pilgrimage, I spoke to several other women about their decision to join the trip. Some emphasized proudly that they did not know anyone but had sensed (sentir) that they had to join the pilgrimage. This was particularly the case for women who came from outside of Catalonia. Some other women knew Dana and her group and regularly received information about the activities she organized. Finally, there were the committed members of the Goddess Wood who

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had heard about the previous pilgrimage in 2002 and were waiting for Dana to send out the flyer. For these participants the pilgrimage represented some kind of ritual progression; part of a sequence of major ritual events of the Goddess Wood. As we have seen, Goddess Wood had three regular ritual events: the celebration of each new moon; the initiation rite allowing a woman to become a daughter of the Goddess and subsequently a guardian of the Goddess at the beginning of every February (the feast of Candlemas); and finally, the pilgrimage of the blood every second summer. Although it had never been explicitly articulated, for some of the more committed members the two initiations and the pilgrimage formed a kind of sequence. Sali,* a Catalan manager in her late thirties, had participated in the first ceremony of initiation in February 2002 and had attended the following new moon celebrations. She remarked that after the celebration in February, “the pilgrimage appeared to me as a continuation, you know, it was like the path [camino] of an initiate, a path you walk along getting to know yourself and other women and having ideas about your life that keep changing and thereby change you. For this reason I decided to go, it was like a natural process, the river flows and takes you there, there was nothing else” (September 21, 2005). Carme,* a Catalan teacher from Tarragona in her late twenties, was initiated as a daughter of the Goddess in February 2004. Listening to other women talking about the previous pilgrimage, she was envious of the intimacy existing among them. She yearned to be able to share such an experience and to share the same sense of community. In February 2005 I myself participated in this rite of passage and became a daughter of the Goddess. I could see other women listening a little enviously to the pilgrims’ accounts of the trip and wanting to be part of that strongly cohesive elite I was also a part of. Some of them told me directly about this feeling, stressing that they were eager to join the next pilgrimage in 2006. As for the Italian pilgrims, the three most committed members of the group, Luciana, Gianmichele, and Susanna, told me that they had wanted to make the trip together. They had participated in most of the activities Celso had led and had asked him to arrange the tour at a moment when they could get time off from their jobs. Other Italian pilgrims told me that they signed up because they relied on Celso’s capacities as a spiritual leader. In the British-American group, several pilgrims had already participated in Roger’s workshops, so they signed up when they saw that somebody they already knew as a good therapist and leader was organizing a trip with attractive themes.

The Call of Mary Magdalene The decisions discussed above did not involve a particular relationship with Mary Magdalene. But there were pilgrims who had felt drawn by her figure, and some of them felt they were literally summoned by the Magdalene to go and visit

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the places related to her. This was particularly the case with pilgrims deciding to set out on a pilgrimage alone, without a group or a leader. They had not been triggered by an announcement or attracted by a particular leader, but driven by their personal interest in or relationship to Mary Magdalene. Encarna, who had turned to spirituality after learning about her elder daughter’s ovarian cyst, remembered hearing about Mary Magdalene one or two years before her first visit to “la Magdalena.” She felt immediately interested because Magdalene was presented to her as related to sacred sexuality. On her quest “to get in touch with her own woman” (mi mujer), Encarna had never yet thought about sexuality as something sacred. This association had impressed her; ever since her childhood, she had seen sexuality as something dirty and sinful: “I thought: ‘Aaah! Sexuality can be sacred! And if it can be sacred, I can.’ If the sexual act is not sinful then I do not feel dirty, this aspect is where it connects me more and . . . to go further on and to look for more. And so there is already a reason to go to the grotto” (February 26, 2006). As we have seen in the introduction Margot* had also felt Magdalene’s call. Carme’s case was more complex and showed how one person’s decision could fall into two different categories of decision making. Carme, who described to me the jealousy and desire that had influenced her decision to join the pilgrimage, told me later that she had also felt a deep connection with Mary Magdalene during a new moon celebration, even before hearing about the pilgrimage: I had listened to the history of Mary Magdalene, the one that they explain in class at school, but I have always seen her as very near, and then I felt this closeness even more when Dana explained about her. The first time I went to a celebration of the new moon with Dana we made a visualization of our guides. I saw Magdalene, I mean, [during the visualization] I saw the picture that Dana had there on the altar representing Mary Magdalene, I saw this. And I did not know that it was Mary Magdalene, I thought that she was the Virgin Mary.25 Dana told me who she was and asked me “Did you see her, are you sure?” and I said, “Yes, I saw her.” (March 11, 2005) The holy card that Dana sometimes put on the altar for the new moon celebrations showed Mary Magdalene dressed in white on a reddish background, offering an egg to the observer. This same card was given to pilgrims at the end of their journey. Thanks to Dana’s explanations, Carme discovered a new version of Magdalene’s life, with which she felt more comfortable. From these decision accounts it is clear that many pilgrims perceived the whole pilgrimage as a rite of passage that would allow them to transform themselves and to pass on to a different spiritual stage in their life; they related this transformation especially to their femininity. These kinds of expectations were clearly

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encouraged in the flyers but also in person by the leaders when prospective participants asked about the trip. Pilgrims read similar ideas in books about sacred journeys (such as Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Crossing to Avalon). Many knew from workshops and reading how rites of passage were structured and supposed to work and tested their own reactions in the phase of decision making for signs that the trip they felt drawn to would indeed provide a spiritual passage for them.

Getting Attuned to the Pilgrimage Sometimes the decision to join the pilgrimage was even considered a sort of initiation process during which the pilgrim had to overcome certain obstacles in order to successfully detach herself from everyday life, thereby beginning the first phase of the rite of passage popularized by Arnold Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage and Victor and Edith Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Many pilgrims held that the things that had happened before embarking on a spiritual trip or a workshop were particularly significant. For this reason, before joining an activity related to spiritual matters, some pilgrims would take time to think about the kind of spiritual work they were going to do, preparing for it and paying attention to things happening around them. In this way they also made sure that the activity they had chosen was indeed important for their spiritual progress. As in societies where special attention is paid to dreams before important life cycle events, the pilgrims focused on their perceptions and insight in this critical decision-making stage. After signing up for the pilgrimage Antònia, had enough time to prepare herself for it. As she had holiday time, she could pay attention to her sensations and observe the signs that confirmed the importance of the pilgrimage for her: Everything was turning out well right up to the day of leaving. The truth is that it was fantastic . . . because in each moment I felt that this was what my soul needed. The dates were correct, all went in a divine way, I didn’t have any doubt whether .  .  . because my friend did not come . . . [I should go] . . . and most of all it was something that was good for me, I had this inner cheerfulness that helped me not to feel the weight of everyday life. (June 4, 2005) The fact that things were working out well and that the preparation for the journey went smoothly was interpreted by Antònia as the confirmation that she had made the right decision and that she was ready to take this step, and so she did not resist the process. She felt that this was going to be a magic journey for her. Things went differently for Antònia when she decided to sign up for the subsequent major ceremony of the Goddess Wood, however. In February 2005 the

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two of us were going to be initiated as daughters of the Goddess. Driving together in her car toward the meeting place, Antònia described all the difficulties she had had to go through to be able to join the ceremony. She contrasted these difficulties and obstacles with the ease of preparations for the pilgrimage. Analyzing the situation led her to consider that there were apparent resistances on her part. Something inside her did not want her to do this: “I actually did not have the time to prepare myself for this initiation,” she said. “I had too much work to do.” She did not feel ready for the ceremony and the consequent resistances inside her manifested themselves through obstacles in the material world. These resistances, she explained to me, were tricks created by the ego because it did not want her to change and to evolve. According to Antònia’s point of view, if things went either very well or very badly during the preparation period, this meant that the subsequent event was right, and would allow her to grow, either through an easy or through a more complicated process. This theory seemed to be part of a set of psychological principles that were never fully explained but often referred to by pilgrims. According to these principles, inside every person there is a mortal ego and an immortal Self.26 The ego is always trying to govern one’s life, convincing one to identify with external features such as name, social status, work, family, and so on. The aim of spiritual evolution is to be able to abandon identification with the ego and live according to one’s self, which is who the person really is as a spiritual being, independently of more superficial characteristics. For the pilgrims, as with other processes of initiation, the pilgrimage represented a way of getting in contact with oneself, or, more exactly, with one’s self. Again here it must be stressed that references to the self and the importance to follow one’s inner voice were not as central in the pilgrims’ worldview as Heelas suggests in discussing the New Age movement.27 The feedback from the group and the leaders was also important in the process of interpretation and decision making; as we will see, the others acted like in a set of mirrors reflecting back one’s own truth. This initiatory character of the pilgrimage emerged from Antònia’s words as she compared her experience before the pilgrimage and before the ritual of initiation as a daughter of the Goddess. The ego felt that a situation that endangered it was approaching and resisted the process. This resistance might manifest itself through obstacles in everyday life or even physical problems. To overcome tricks on the part of the ego and to avoid reactions and obstacles, future initiates had to spend time alone to prepare for the process of change. In the cases of both individual and group pilgrims, there was a tension between the attraction the pilgrim felt toward the pilgrimage and doubts about its “effectiveness” in terms of the pilgrim’s spiritual evolution. Doubts were gradually neutralized through a complex system of testing. When these people received information about the organized trip or about the possibility of getting

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to the Sainte-Baume with a friend, they were attentive to their sensations while reading the announcement or hearing the information. The fact that one had just earned some extra money or that the holiday period coincided with that of the pilgrimage was taken as a positive sign. In the case of the pilgrimage of the blood, Dana invited each woman to pay attention to her feelings: In order to join the pilgrimage she should feel within her a profound yearning to offer her blood to the Earth. In Antònia’s car, Sol discussed this requirement for profound yearning with the others and said she was not quite sure about feeling this kind of desire herself. I used this occasion to explain that I too did not feel totally at ease because I did not notice this yearning, and in fact I did not really understand what it meant. The three women immediately reassured me by saying that they did not know exactly what this yearning was meant to be either. However, they concluded that if I was there, as we all were, this meant that we had felt something that attracted us to the pilgrimage, and that was what was important. For most pilgrims (and especially for the American ones) the trip was a good opportunity to have a guided tour of interesting spots in France. But even if they admitted to having been driven by curiosity, the pilgrims did not interpret this curiosity as something superficial, or driven by chance. They identified curiosity and general interest in some particular theme as the outward expression of a deeper intuition. Intellectual curiosity might be the impulse through which certain pilgrims eventually signed up for the pilgrimage, but once the trip was over, they arrived at the understanding that the real reasons why they had felt attracted to it were spiritual. Magdalene pilgrims from different groups explained to me that when somebody felt attracted to the trip, it was because the energy that was present in the desired object (the trip) was in some way linked to the energy of the person. The outside world was often described as a mirror, allowing the persons to see what was going on inside themselves. While speaking of Celso’s pilgrimage as an initiatory journey, Immacolata, the woman from Rome leading a parallel spiritual life hidden from her parents and most of her friends, commented: “Well, maybe an initiatory journey is something that allows you . . . a discovery really of . . . I mean, as if these things that we saw worked a bit as a mirror and made us rediscover some values” (April 8, 2005). As we drove in Antònia’s car through the Ampurdan toward the meeting place, I was surprised by the kind of personal issues that Sol, Antònia, and Isabel were sharing. Sol, especially, spoke openly about her sexuality and her conflicts with her parents as though we all had known each other since childhood. The age difference that separated us three younger women from Antònia, who had two sons in their twenties, seemed to be no obstacle. The two other women listened to Sol’s stories and tried to give her advice by speaking about their own experiences, sometimes referring to things they had learned in workshops that had been

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useful for them. Soon we were involved in a passionate exchange about Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic gospels and the Goddess, the women citing things they had heard or books they had read. There was a sense of companionship and shared enthusiasm among the women. Antònia commented afterward: “From the very beginning I loved this . . . it was really like setting out for a summer camp.” Along with their hiking shoes, notebooks and cameras, each pilgrim had some personal spiritual baggage he or she brought to the pilgrimage. There were also other theories they would learn about and put to the test during the pilgrimage, often discussing them with the leaders or with more experienced pilgrims. In the next chapter we will explore the spiritual background of the pilgrims in order to understand their way of approaching the pilgrimage and interpreting its outcomes.

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The Lost Connection with The Feminine

In their public and private conversations with me, it seemed as though most of the pilgrims in all three groups felt themselves to be on a spiritual path toward a final state that they described using terms such as enlightenment from the Buddhist tradition, self-realization, or fulfillment, happiness, and peace. In order to get there they needed to heal their wounds, forgive those who had hurt them— in this or in other lives—and also forgive themselves. After the pilgrimage many of them described the experience as an important part of their personal evolutionary path. The pilgrims considered themselves as part of a world made of energy, a living force that permeated everything. Inside this world, everything and everyone had a specific energy field, also identified as an aura. In this context, the physical body was seen as the visible part of a much bigger energetic body that surrounded the person. Things happening to and around a person were often interpreted as the outer manifestation of some information that was already present in the form of energy within her energetic body. If Antònia, for instance, was verbally attacked by a stranger on the road, this could be interpreted as the result of the presence of aggressive energy in Antònia’s energy field. The aggressive energy stored in the stranger’s energy field had resonated with that of Antònia, and had caused the former to act on this aggression. If Antònia wanted to avoid further trouble she would need to release this aggressive energy.1 As pilgrims like Antònia pointed out to me, once you made the decision to join the pilgrimage it was important to prepare for it, to get attuned to it. If you failed to do so or if there was something inside of you resisting the pilgrimage experience it would come out, as in the following example. It was the evening of July 26 of 2003 and it had been a warm, sunny day at the Sainte-Baume. The main feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, celebrated on July 22, was over, but there were still celebrations going on in Saint-Maximin. That day Celso’s tour was due to begin—pilgrims were supposed to arrive that same afternoon, but it was eight pm and they still had not arrived. The only place to stay at the Sainte-Baume is the Hôtellerie, a large building situated on an esplanade at the foot of the mountain and just in front of the cave. The nuns of the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus run the hostel and offer cheap and clean 59

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accommodation. Pilgrims can share bedrooms, and there are communal showers and bathrooms for each floor. Just in front of the entrance there is a little chapel with modern frescoes of episodes from the life of Mary Magdalene and her arrival in Provence. The sober building and ambiance inside the Hôtellerie, the coming and going of the nuns, and the morning lauds and the evening mass all evoke memories of ancient Christian pilgrimages and of a life regulated by sacred rhythms. I was having dinner in the canteen of the Hôtellerie, sharing the food served by the nuns with French Catholic pilgrims and wondering whether Celso’s group would make it before ten pm when the nuns closed the doors of the hostel for the night. Around nine o’clock, Celso hurried into the room followed by Susanna, the only one in the group who spoke some French. I welcomed them and helped them to find the nun who assigned rooms. Outside, the Italian pilgrims were getting out of their cars, exhausted. The journey had begun with some difficulties and there had already been quarrels. One of the pilgrims’ cars had arrived late at the departure rendezvous, a petrol station near Genova, and the pilgrims traveling in the two other cars had had to wait there for two hours. Finally, during the trip from Italy to France, the driver of this same car had got lost and this had caused the group to arrive so late. From his long experience of leading groups, Celso knew that these things happened. He commented that especially on the first day of a sacred journey, with the group recently formed, the pilgrims had difficulties creating a single group energy field and getting attuned with one another traveling together as a whole; moreover, sometimes single pilgrims resisted joining the pilgrimage or the group. This inner resistance manifested itself in external behavior like being late or getting lost. The Italian pilgrims had a fast picnic dinner, sitting in the hostel’s courtyard while playing with Sathya, a captivating two-year-old boy. Celso offered everybody his organic food, joking about the fact that these Italians would never give up eating their classic paninis (sandwiches) stuffed with ham and other unhealthy pork products. I knew some of the pilgrims already and was gradually introduced to the rest of them. After a few moments some of them started to analyze the difficult arrival at the Sainte-Baume in terms of energy, expressing their hope that after the numerous obstacles of the day all the pilgrims and especially the ones causing so much trouble had overcome all resistance. Then they began to ask me questions about Mary Magdalene and the Sainte-Baume. What was it like there? Had it been a powerful experience for me to stay there for so many days? As I tried to answer as vaguely as possible, those pilgrims I knew better began to tell me about their feelings in the days before setting out and on the trip to France. In the twilight, these Italians soon forgot their tiredness and resentment over the trouble getting there, everybody was wondering what the journey would bring.

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The first formal gathering of the group that would take place one hour later had been organized by Celso to allow them to get to know each other better and to create a balanced group energy field. As we will see energy discourse was a central element of the pilgrims’ spirituality. The constant reference to energy allowed them to describe the world in a language they perceived as radically different from the Catholic one. Whereas Catholic dogmas (e.g., the power of the Holy Spirit) had to be accepted through an act of faith, according to the pilgrims the existence of energy could be experienced directly through the body and without the need for intermediaries such as priests.

The First Gathering and Sharing of the Group Even if pilgrims of the same group had already met each other on the way to or at the meeting point, the official introductions of all the pilgrims normally took place during the first group gathering when the leaders introduced themselves to the full group and invited the participants to do the same and share the reasons for coming. This was an intense moment that marked the beginning of the existence of the group as such. The information received during this first encounter offered pilgrims the basics in order to contextualize the figure of Mary Magdalene, to interpret the visited places and to relate to each other. At this time the leader also established his or her position in the group and set out the geographical and ideological coordinates to be followed on the trip. On that first evening the guides had the opportunity to affect their groups, providing a context that would shape the experience of the journey. In fact, all three organized pilgrimages held their first official gatherings in the evening, followed by a shared meal. Even if the external setting was different for the three groups, what happened in the first gatherings was quite similar. Whether among the pilgrims gathered at the hostel of the Sainte-Baume, in a hotel in Marseille, or in a private house in the Catalan woods, there was a mix of expectations, doubts and excited sharing of feelings and ideas. The American and British members from Roger’s group had arrived in France either that day or the day before. After meeting at the hotel, they went off to enjoy a fancy evening meal at a restaurant in the Vieux-Port, drinking excellent Provençal wine and enjoying seafood and other local specialties. In Dana’s group there was a strong sense of union and belonging right from the beginning. Ten of the women already knew each other from the Goddess Wood meetings, and newcomers fit easily into their established sisterhood. The Iberian pilgrims had a picnic dinner in the dining room of the summer camp, some of the group went to sleep in the rural house Dana shared with some friends, and the others stayed at the camp in rooms for eight to ten people.

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The Italian pilgrims gathered in the meeting room of the hostel that had been arranged in a circle. Celso began the first gathering, devoted to sharing and making contact. While pilgrims listened to a CD called “Hymn to the Feminine,” Susanna distributed some sheets of paper with questions about the pilgrims’ expectations and feelings related to the trip. Then Celso briefly introduced the tour: “The aim of this journey is to produce states of the soul, openings,” he explained. “These are journeys of the soul that allow the person to find parts of herself.” All three leaders of the organized pilgrimages introduced themselves to the pilgrims as those who knew—that is, those who had gathered historical and esoteric information about Mary Magdalene and themes related to her and who were now sharing that knowledge. They also acted as therapists who induced certain meditative or self-reflexive states in order to help pilgrims to have deeper personal insights during the trip. Both Dana and Celso were always ready to help pilgrims interpret their dreams, feelings and visions. Roger, on the other hand, was much less involved with pilgrims’ personal experiences, acting, he said, as “a psychopomp” who led the souls to the places and let them have their experiences there. Dana and Celso, however, tended to analyze the pilgrims’ experiences and invited them to pay attention to their feelings. This process was particularly evident in the three questions Italian pilgrims had to answer during the first evening. After describing his perceptions and insights about the figure of Mary Magdalene, Celso invited the pilgrims to briefly introduce themselves and say a few words about what led them to join this trip. One after another, the Italians introduced themselves, spoke about their jobs and described spiritual experiences and skills. In sharing her personal spiritual curriculum—that is, the most important workshops she had been to and the healing techniques she practiced or even taught—each person took responsibility for her spiritual skills and implicitly offered them to the rest of the group. People from the group might thereafter ask her for help through the techniques she had mastered. These might be therapies involving the use of crystals, energy flows through the hands and so on. The status of individuals within the group did not depend so much on their income or profession as secretaries or businessmen, but from their healing skills and spiritual knowledge. Every Italian pilgrim except for one had a significant background in spiritual matters. Some worked as therapists professionally, while others only used the healing techniques they had learned to help friends and relatives. After introducing themselves, pilgrims spoke briefly about their expectations of and objectives for the trip, answering Celso’s three questions, which had already appeared in the last part of the questionnaire pilgrims had received via email and that Susanna had handed out again: What are your objectives for and expectations of this trip? How will you know that you have reached them?

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What is the most important thing you would like to learn, change, or reinforce during this trip? These three questions point again toward an idea of pilgrimage as a rite of transformation and learning and an opportunity for leaving behind previous habits or life stages. The pilgrims’ answers show they engage consciously in this rite of passage and even specify the outcome they hope for. As with their crafted rituals, the pilgrims have notions about the general structure of the whole pilgrimage and its symbolic effects, but they do not know the exact script. In fact, even though the leaders of the three groups had in mind a general structure and sequence, outlined in the programs, these were hardly preset scripts and could be altered according to the circumstances or the feelings and insights of the leader or the group. The following were the objectives mentioned and some comments the person eventually added. I have indicated only the names of those pilgrims who will be mentioned further on in the text: PAOLA: To discover my female part, to understand it and to make peace with it. WOMAN SPEAKER: To awaken memories from past lives related to Cathars and Templar knights. WOMAN SPEAKER: To make peace between my inner warrior side and my magical feminine side, to manifest my healer side, to recover pieces of my soul, to live with less conflict, fear, anger, to live out more fully the feminine. VITTORIO: To discover more about the Templars and what they wanted, to be able to recognize signals faster than normally. AUGUSTO: To win back the territory of Gaul. [Augusto joked here, referring to his Roman emperor’s name.] To understand a vision I had during a workshop where I saw myself as a Templar knight with corpses around me, holding a head in my hand. I felt calm and feel that there is a murderer’s force inside me I want to get to know. IMMACOLATA: To be there, to be in the Earth like Magdalene, to feel that I am there. SUSANNA: To understand the difference between feminine and masculine that I did not understand during Celso’s [earlier] workshop. To integrate the masculine and feminine parts that I feel to be always separated, either I live one or the other. GEMMA: To work on my feminine and masculine side and on my sensuality. Living my sensuality is a taboo for me, Mary Magdalene will help me. GIANMICHELE: To learn from Magdalene about the feminine and the masculine, to consolidate parts of myself that came out in recent years. I

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already felt an intense vibration in the Magdalene’s chapel of the hostel. To look for the matrix within which I am about to model my life. COSTANZA: To understand the hidden and the manifest Sophia, through Magdalene, who is Sophia, the Feminine Holy Spirit for the Gnostics. WOMAN SPEAKER: The quest for the Grail. When I was nineteen years old I had a vision of the Grail. I saw a sword of light. I am a warrior and want to be more feminine, to find a new identity linked to healing, femininity, sweetness. LUCIANA: To confront once and for all my Cathar side that repudiates flesh. I had a vision of seven Templars, from whom I was asking forgiveness. They gave me a sword. I want to take that sword and be worthy of it. To become an instrument of Lilith. Sometimes Celso asked further questions to clarify the person’s argument, or helped her to better formulate her objectives. He pointed out that nobody should formulate objectives negatively, for example, saying that they wanted to eliminate some particular quality, because the unconscious would recall what was being negated. Rather than focusing on eliminating qualities they wanted to get rid of, pilgrims should transform them into something different and positive. Celso was the only leader who encouraged his group to clearly formulate the objectives they had for the trip. The Italian pilgrims’ interests and objectives did not always coincide with those from other groups, but one important common theme did emerge: the quest for the Feminine. This desire to discover one’s personal feminine side, feminine energy, or simply the Feminine had been mentioned by the Catalan women I traveled with toward Besalú and emerged again and again in the discourses of most of the pilgrims I spoke to.

The Quest for the Feminine Having overcome doubts and economic problems, and arranged their holiday to fit in with the pilgrimage, the pilgrims were ready to begin, full of expectation and eager to seize important signals and messages they felt this experience would bring them. By visiting places related to the Goddess and to Mary Magdalene seen as the manifestation of a fully developed feminine, they hoped to establish a deeper contact with the Sacred Feminine inside and outside of them. As we have seen, many of the Italian pilgrims referred to a quest for the Feminine or a desire to harmonize the masculine and feminine side inside themselves without explaining this point further. In all the organized groups many pilgrims had joined the pilgrimage looking for a deeper relationship to their feminine side, a direct contact with the Goddess, or a stronger link to Mother

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Earth. They felt that something was missing from their lives, that they had not been able to live out their femininity. As Antònia observed, “I felt that it was my moment and that this could be something that might change my vision of the world, of things, I do not know. . . . something related to the feminine world that has always been difficult for me to contact” (June 4, 2005). Several women commented on this difficulty of contacting the feminine world that Antònia was talking about. The importance of discovering one’s female side was highlighted as well by some men. For men, the contact with their feminine side was an essential step in their quest for their maleness. William, a university professor from Roger’s group, had been on a similar quest years earlier, attending workshops by Robert Bly2 and founding a men’s group. He decided to join the pilgrimage together with his wife Lynn because he wanted to make contact again with this kind of exploration. Speaking about the pilgrimage, Gianmichele, who helped Celso with the organization of the Italian pilgrimage, explained: I come to the Magdalene in order to integrate again the masculine and the feminine . . . A kind of pilgrimage to look for a complete figure . . . for the integrity of the masculine and the feminine together. On this route you see the feminine and the masculine because if you do not know them both you cannot put them together . . . Magdalene with her strong sacred feminine is able to point up the strong sacred masculine, that may be that of Jesus for instance. And in this way these two can then be put together. (April 3, 2005) In the context of the pilgrimage, the terms feminine and masculine energy were not explicitly defined, yet there appeared to be a consensus as to their meaning, presumably deduced from qualities attributed to each kind of energy.3 Feminine energy was commonly associated with sweetness, receptivity, caring, and nurturing, but masculine energy was less well defined. When I asked Gianmichele to clarify what he meant by his feminine and masculine side, he explained: It is a bit like the image of the Tao . . . it is like feeling, obviously inside of me . . . a feminine side that allows me to harmonize with everything, that has a feminine quality in the outside world that surrounds me, including women. Therefore it is as if I managed to feel .  .  . and to get nourished by, that complementary side that allows me to live, that I cannot do without . . . Indeed I probably really saw myself in my masculine dimension only in the moment I became conscious that there was also the feminine part. Before I did not see either. I was not able to distinguish them .  .  . Most of the time you need to use them together,

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because if you work on only one side or on the other things cannot be done. (April 3, 2005) Gianmichele’s idea that masculine energy could not function properly without the presence of the feminine, and vice versa, was particularly evident among Celso’s pilgrims but also present among pilgrims from the other groups. Apart from Dana’s group, the others included men. Even if their main focus remained on the Feminine, Magdalene leaders and pilgrims did not want to dismiss the Masculine. The pilgrims saw Jesus and Magdalene as human beings who had managed to integrate these two energies inside of them. They explained their emphasis on the feminine side as a necessary consequence of the systematic denigration of this latter during the centuries of patriarchal domination.4 Because of this constant tendency to overpower the feminine, it often remained unclear to pilgrims what exactly was the masculine energy. The pilgrims tried to create new definitions of an independent, free-standing Feminine and tended to define the Masculine in opposition to it.

Spirituality and Female Empowerment As I pointed out earlier there is no common agreement among scholars or among spiritual practitioners around the world on a single term for the corpus of theories and practices I will introduce here. Pilgrims from Spain and Italy did not like the terms Pagan or Neopagan because they considered the word Pagan as still too negatively charged within the Catholic societies they had grown up in. Nor could they identify with the term feminist spirituality because many of them criticized certain aspects of feminism. They spoke of spirituality and some of them used interchangeably the terms Goddess spirituality, feminine spirituality, or women’s spirituality. In the kind of spirituality they practiced, gender categories and female empowerment played important roles. Cynthia Eller uses the term feminist spirituality to describe the groups of women she studied in the 1990s in the United States, and the pilgrims shared many of the theories and practices described in her book Living in the Lap of the Goddess (1993).5 It is a basic premise of the feminist spirituality movement that Western women have lost contact with their feminine essence. This is attributed to the principles of patriarchal society that undermined women’s power and autonomy and to the consequences of the sexual revolution in the sixties that led women who wanted to be successful to adopt a masculine way of life. According to feminist spiritualists, women had lost contact with nature’s rhythm. In The Great Cosmic Mother (1987), one of the fundamental books of feminist spirituality, Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor argue that “based in matricide, the death of all nature, and the utter exploitation of women, Western culture has now run

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itself into the ground, [there is] no other way but to return to the Mother who gives us life. If we are to survive we have to attune yet again to the spirits of nature.”6 These authors call on women, as the guardians of the living earth, to recuperate ancient rituals celebrating the changes of the seasons, related to the sun’s cycle, and the changing phases of the moon.7 As with Goddess Wood, the most important gatherings of groups linked to feminist spirituality take place each month at the full or new moon and on the eight Sabbaths of the year: two solstices and equinoxes, and four intermediary feasts (Candlemas, February 2; Beltane, April 30; Lammas, August 1; Samhain, October 31). The women who perform these rituals often say they do so to attune themselves to the cycles of Mother Earth and to learn to pay attention to and celebrate their own body cycles. There are many books relating women’s experiences of regaining their contact with Mother Earth and with their own female body. Antònia, for instance, told me she had wanted to join a women’s group and be initiated into the secret wisdom of the Goddess after reading Paulo Coelho’s novel Brida (1990). It is useful to think of the Magdalene pilgrims’ spirituality as a polythetic class—that is, following Martin Southwold, a bundle of attributes all of which are not necessarily possessed by each member of the class.8 The polythetic class describing the pilgrims’ spirituality I propose to use in this text is the following:9 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Use of an energy discourse; Centrality of ritual creativity; Use of gender as a central element for religious and social criticism;10 Emphasis on self-realization and self-authenticity;11 Sacralization of body and sexuality; Importance of the connection with the Goddess and Mother Earth and practices to obtain this connection; Reclamation of a matriarchal past and of beliefs in unity with paganism; Criticism of Christianity for being androcentric, exclusive, and disembodied; Androcentrism considered as the basis for the current catastrophic situation; and Rejection of the concept of religion: you need no intermediaries to relate to the divine.

In their own ways all three leaders shared all of these attributes, and the Magdalene pilgrims I accompanied shared or ended up embracing most of them. In Celso’s group in particular, there were people who had just started discovering theories about the Sacred Feminine, and who learned most theories related to spiritual feminist issues during the pilgrimage. The Magdalene pilgrims I talked to did not define themselves as witches or Pagans and did not consider their rituals to be magic.12 Dana told me that even

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if she shared most of the ideas of Diane Stein and Zsuzsanna Budapest (two of the better known proponents of feminist spirituality), she did not call herself a witch or actually practice magic. Like the other leaders, Dana believed that there was still much of value in the Christian tradition and particularly in its sacred sites and spiritual figures. This was the main difference between the Magdalene pilgrims and the spiritual feminists described by Eller. Even if the Magdalene pilgrims considered what they identified as the Church—with its dogmas and use of Jesus’s teachings—androcentric and guilty of persecuting witches and other groups considered as heretic, they also believed in the power of what they referred to as Christian mystical teachings. These teachings, they maintained, had been preserved by heretic groups such as the Cathars and Templars, and their healing power was still available in certain shrines.13 According to the Magdalene pilgrims, the Goddess manifested herself through many faces, and each ancient goddess represented one of her faces. Even if it was in some way implicit that the Goddess was eminently female and that she necessarily had a male companion, on these pilgrimages there were no rituals to honor a god. These pilgrims did not use the masculine term God to refer to a higher masculine principle that manifested itself through different gods. When they spoke of gods, it was always to refer to the male companion of a goddess (e.g., Osiris companion of Isis). As for the male equivalent of Mother Earth, there seemed to be no clear manifestation of a God’s fatherly energy. Sometimes the Sky was referred to as Father; at other times the Sun was taken as the highest expression of the masculine principle. Both entities, the Sun and the Sky, were only a pale reflection of the power attributed to Mother Earth and did not appear as totally separate from her. Magdalene pilgrims referred to theories from the corpus Eller described as “the myth of matriarchal history.” Like American feminist spiritualists,14 Magdalene pilgrims from all the groups and especially those from the Goddess Wood, referred to ancient matriarchal times when a female divinity was revered and women were honored for their life-giving powers. What exactly caused the end of this kind of matriarchal society, described as sedentary and pacific, is unclear, but the result was a shift to a patriarchal society based on the domination of women, the exploitation of nature and the belief in a male divinity. Apart from Dana, who sometimes presented matriarchal prehistory as historically demonstrated, the two other leaders and most of the Magdalene pilgrims did not treat them as historical truths. I concur with Eller15 that they related to matriarchal prehistory as mainstream Christians relate to the so-called historical facts in the Bible. From my own experience of talking with Spanish and Italian Catholics about the Sangraal theories, when challenged about the episodes related in the Ancient or New Testament, most of them would conclude that the most important thing was the spiritual message deriving from the sacred scriptures. In the same way, most Magdalene pilgrims related to matriarchal prehistoric

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theories creatively, emphasizing that the important thing was the message it brought to women and men. Even if traits of misandry emerged from time to time in Dana’s exclusively female group, the importance and sacredness of masculine energy was also emphasized. The aim of these pilgrims was to find a balance between their masculine and feminine energy and to live according to a different, nonpatriarchal concept of masculinity and femininity. They held that their quest for the Sacred Feminine would lead them to recuperate their contact with their feminine side and to find a new, more balanced way of manifesting their male side.16 Leaders and Magdalene pilgrims were looking for a strategy based on Jungian psychology that allowed them to transcend sexual dimorphism and the differences between sex and gender. They longed for a harmonized integration of what they described as feminine and masculine energies on both an individual and a collective level. Most of the Magdalene pilgrims referred to the Goddess and to a personal Christian pantheon composed principally of Jesus, the Virgin Mary,17 and Mary Magdalene, but also of the archangel Saint Michael and other saints of personal significance, usually related to their own name, family or birthplace. The pilgrims described Mary Magdalene and the Virgin as the expression of particular aspects of the Goddess and sometimes described Jesus as the expression of the divine masculine principle (they did not use the term God). Even though they considered them as supranatural beings, pilgrims also referred to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene as historical characters and emphasized their human traits and experience. For them, these three figures were examples of a path of human evolution that they themselves might conceivably follow and represented a goal of spiritual elevation. In this context, these Christian figures pertained to an assembly of sages along with masters from other traditions such as the Buddha. Most pilgrims had been exposed to the basics of Goddess psychology. Analysts deriving from the Jungian tradition, such as Roger Woolger and Jean Shinoda Boden, have used Jung’s archetype theory and Erich Neumann’s 1955 study The Great Mother to analyze patterns of behaviour in contemporary society and associate them with goddesses or gods from the ancient Greek pantheon.18 Jean Shinoda Bolen’s books were widely known among Iberian pilgrims and Woolger’s among American and British pilgrims. To introduce the principal theories of Goddess psychology I will refer here to The Goddess Within, which Woolger wrote with his former wife Jennifer Barker in 1990. As the authors explain: By goddess we mean a psychological description of a complex female character type that we intuitively recognize both in ourselves and in the women around us, as well as in the images and icons that are

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everywhere in our culture. For example, the smartly dressed, intelligent young career woman we see everywhere in our cities is the living embodiment of a goddess type we call the Athena woman, named after the Greek goddess who was patroness of the ancient city of Athens. Magazines, movies, and novels all reproduce her as a stereotype because she is so prevalent today . . . There is a fundamental dynamic behind the behavior of such a woman that makes her unique as a type. Part of it is socially acquired and part seems to be innate. When such a psychological dynamic is observed in a whole group of individuals, it is what Jung called an archetype . . . When we ourselves dream or fantasize, our unconscious mind may draw upon the common pool of archetypal images in our culture (Jung called this pool the collective unconscious).19 The authors describe the major goddess types in Western society besides Athena: the passionate Aphrodite, the mysterious Persephone, the solitary Artemis, the child-loving Demeter, and the possesive Hera. Every woman is ruled by different goddesses and readers are invited to discover them. Ancient myths are considered “highly sophisticated psychology” and analyzed and interpreted in order to explain fully each of the mentioned Goddess archetypes. The authors talk about a “psychospiritual imbalance” in Western society, because the masculine side has been overemphasized, creating a neurotic culture that is “missing the feminine dimension.” They maintain that “there is a wounded goddess in us all”20 caused by the patriarchal pattern of Western culture and the Judeo-Christian image of God as Father,21 and they advocate a return of the Goddess in psychological terms. The wounds especially relevant for the pilgrims were those caused by “the puritanical fear of the feminine and the body among certain factions in Christianity.”22 In Roger’s and the pilgrims’ terms, if the end of the twentieth century had been marked by a return of the Goddess, the beginning of the twenty-first century was seeing the return of Mary Magdalene, announced by the Sangraal theories in 1982 and brought to worldwide notice by The Da Vinci Code. In a later article, Roger wrote: To an observer of patterns in religious history, the reemergence and popularity of the figure of the Magdalene surely represents for one thing a healthy compensation for the state of the Catholic Church and its medieval attitudes to sex and women, sadly symbolized by the ailing pontiff, Pope John Paul II . . . In reaction to all this there is everywhere a huge hunger for the divine feminine currently flooding through western society, about to sweep away the pathological, patriarchal foundations of the Christian Church once and for all. Women all over the

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world rightly long to be accorded their true dignity as creative and passionate beings, coequal with, not subject to, men. And the image that, Aphrodite-like, rises from the receding foam is none other than that of Mary Magdalene, the lost Goddess of Christianity in more ways than one.23 In the pilgrims’ view, the women and men of Western society were finally ready to acknowledge Mary Magdalene’s legacy, the hidden part of Christian teachings that had been obscured by the Christian Church. This process of obscuring was taken not only in a metaphorical, but also a literal sense by pilgrims who considered dark statues of the Virgin Mary to be a particularly powerful expression of those parts of the Sacred Feminine rejected by Christianity.

Mary and Magdalene: Opposed and Complementary Archetypes References to the Virgin appeared as soon as pilgrims began to speak about Mary Magdalene and it became clear that the significance of one could not be understood without understanding the other. Held by the pilgrims to be the expression of the many faces of the Goddess, Magdalene, and Mary seemed to play contrasting and complementary roles with identities particularly related to the presence/absence of the physical and the sexual. In looking for a new, positive model of womanhood, both male and female pilgrims considered Magdalene the figure that allowed them to heal the Madonna/whore split inside them. Menstrual blood and rituals related to menstruation were considered to be of great importance in this context. Influenced by Marina Warner’s study Alone of All Her Sex; The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), pilgrims considered the pure—that is, nonmenstruating—and stainless Virgin as the opposite of the bloody and sexual Magdalene.24 During the first evening gathering at the Sainte-Baume, Celso told his pilgrims that Magdalene represented a model of the Feminine that we all have inside ourselves and need to recover. He explained that for two thousand years, the Virgin had been the only consistently acceptable model of femininity. Mary Magdalene had been considered important in the Middle Ages, but after the Counter Reformation her figure gradually lost importance and status, receiving little attention during the last five hundred years. The Virgin, however, had maintained her importance throughout and there was even a current movement inside Catholicism, mostly linked in Italy to Radio Maria, to promote the recognition of the Virgin as the coparticipant of Jesus in the process of redemption. As for Mary Magdalene, Celso observed, the New Age movement was instrumental in bringing her to public attention. According to him, the figure of Mary

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Magdalene reemerged because the Virgin had become “too celestial.” Magdalene had a strong carnality and sensuality, but was also linked to transcendence and was crucial for men and women. Thanks to Mary Magdalene, there were no longer only the two extreme models of the virgin and the whore to refer to. The pilgrims and leaders knew Warner’s theories either directly from her book, or indirectly from other books and articles. Citing Mary Magdalene as providing a point of reference for sinful believers, Warner wrote: The Virgin Mary could not meet this condition, for in her absolute purity and her exemption from the common lot she could not sin. Another figure consequently developed to fill this important lacuna, that of St. Mary Magdalene, who, together with the Virgin Mary, typifies Christian society’s attitudes to women and to sex. Both female figures are perceived in sexual terms: Mary as a virgin and Mary Magdalene as a whore—until her repentance. The Magdalene, like Eve, was brought into existence by the powerful undertow of misogyny in Christianity, which associates women with the dangers and degradation of the flesh. For this reason she became a prominent and beloved saint.25 All three guides, Celso, Roger, and Dana, had lived rather turbulent lives with several broken relationships or marriages. Throughout the tour, they emphasized the relief they felt in finding Magdalene’s recovered archetype of the lover. They spoke openly about the difficulties they had experienced in their previous relationships and their quest for a successful model of partnership.26 Whereas Roger and Celso defined the Magdalene archetype as opposed and/or complementary to that of the Virgin, Dana saw Magdalene as the archetype of the Lover and Mary the Virgin as the archetype of the Mother. Jesus was a principal figure in Dana’s discourse, whereas the two male leaders rarely spoke of Magdalene’s relationship to Jesus. Considering Magdalene an archetype allowed the leaders to maintain an ambiguous position—considering her as either a metaphysical being appearing to them from the outside through dreams or visions, or as archetypal material emerging from the unconscious, or both. Paradoxically, what Warner wrote in 1976 still applies to the apparently revolutionary versions of Magdalene’s life presented in the spiritual-esoteric literature about the Grail mysteries and the life of Jesus:27 “The Church venerates two ideals of the feminine—consecrated chastity in the Virgin Mary and regenerate sexuality in the Magdalene. Populous as the Catholic pantheon is, it is nevertheless so impoverished that it cannot conceive of a single female saint independently of her relations (or lack of relations) with men . . . Together, the Virgin and the Magdalene form a diptych of Christian patriarchy’s idea of woman. There is no place in the conceptual architecture of Christian society for a single woman who is neither a virgin nor a whore.”28

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Even though Dan Brown spoke in his book of a return of the Sacred Feminine and presented his version of Magdalene’s life story as feminist, he ended up representing the saint as the wife of a great man.29 As the incarnation of the Holy Grail (Sangraal), Magdalene was described in Platonic terms as the vessel containing Jesus’s blood.30 Paradoxically, the Magdalene produced by an era that one might expect to be more liberated in feminist terms than the previous ones produced an image of her that perfectly fit the patriarchal structures it pretended to question.31 If one follows Ingrid Maisch’s lead in her 1996 book Mary Magdalene and considers the different Magdalenes in their relation to the situation of women in each period, then the Sangraal-Magdalene of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln popularized by The Da Vinci Code raises questions about the solidity of feminist advances at the opening of the twenty-first century. The pilgrims and leaders struggled to find a Magdalene outside the VirginMagdalene dichotomy. Warner’s theories about the attributes of the Virgin as a mythological figure (humility and submission to the male figures of God the Father and Jesus the Son) provided a sort of negative mould for the pilgrims’ Magdalene: “The cult of Mary is inextricably interwoven with Christian ideas about the dangers of the flesh and their special connection with women,”32 and “every facet of the Virgin had been systematically developed to diminish, not increase, her likeness to the female condition. Her freedom from sex, painful delivery, age, death, and all sin exalted her ipso facto above ordinary women and showed them up as inferior.”33 As opposed to the Virgin described by Warner, the pilgrims’ Magdalene empowered ordinary women (and men), was strictly related to physicality and sexuality, and represented in fact the physical female condition in its most elevated form. In a bygone era, Mary Magdalene’s figure helped prostitutes to find their way toward salvation and represented the possibility of salvation for those women who did not want to renounce sexuality.34 The example of Magdalene as prostitute demonstrated that a woman who had sinned greatly could not only be saved, but even have an important role alongside Jesus and actually attend his resurrection. The pilgrims felt that through her example Magdalene could help to heal the symbolic wounds inflicted on women by the unattainable example of the Virgin Mary, who, alone of all her sex, was never in contact with blood. By the end of the twentieth century, the example of Magdalene comforted women and helped them to overcome their sense of guilt, through appearing as a proud priestess, lover, and even legitimate wife of Jesus. Unlike Warner,35 pilgrims embraced Jungian theories without criticism. As we have seen, they tended to consider the Virgin Mary as the expression of the archetype of the mother and Magdalene as the expression of the archetypal wounded lover. Roger was the only leader who explicitly referred to the influence Marina Warner’s writings had on his 2005 article “The Return of Mary Magdalene”:

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I am delighted that Dan Brown stirred it up so much. We are all curious about her [Mary Magdalene], I know her power, I don’t have to find it out in books, but I love to see how it wakes up at all levels of life. And she is for me very much the other side of the Virgin Mary. We have idealized the mother of Jesus so much that almost nothing human was left in her. And in the article I wrote, this was my idea, following the writings of Marina Warner on the Virgin Mary. She says that the Early Church was so terrified of sexuality that they idealized virginity . . . All it did was to bring this [Madonna-Whore] split36 in society that we’ve been living with for almost two thousand years. It’s been haunting so many generations. [Mary Magdalene represents] a healing force to rebalance the split. (October 6, 2005) Considering the Virgin and Mary Magdalene in Jungian terms as two expressions of the archetype of the Great Mother, Roger and the other leaders presented them not as cultural products, but as eternal figures of the human unconscious. What Warner and the pilgrims seem to omit in their descriptions of the Virgin is the actual cult paid to the Mother of God by Christian laypeople. What was said and written about the Virgin Mary through the centuries was— and still is—creatively used by believers to model their own Virgin Mary. A number of ethnographies have made it clear that the Virgin of the Christian writers and priests is quite different from the Mary of believers’ and pilgrims’ accounts, where she appears as a maternal figure of great power that sometimes bears revolutionary political messages.37 As Katherine Jansen shows, a similar process of creative appropriation happened with Mary Magdalene in the later Middle Ages.38 Judging by what I heard from Catholic pilgrims at the Sainte-Baume, more anthropological research remains to be done about the way Catholics venerate and relate to Magdalene.

“When God Was a Woman” Apart from Mary, who appeared in all three leaders’ introductory speeches, Celso and Dana also referred to Eve; from their perspective, the serpent was not the symbol of the devil, as in the Christian reading, but the symbol of the Goddess and of the ancient Goddess cult. In this context, Lilith, Adam’s former wife, was considered as an exponent of the Goddess religion, someone who had refused to renounce her beliefs and had therefore been repudiated by Adam and his male God. The serpent offering Eve the apple of wisdom was not seen as the temptation of Eve to sin, but rather as a return to the cult of the Goddess. Leaders and pilgrims were influenced by books like Merlin Stone’s When God

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was a Woman (1976), and later books inspired by it, which had been translated into Italian and Spanish.39 These authors considered the depiction of Eve as the product of Adam’s rib and the cause of mankind’s exile from Eden to be the mythological base of the Judeo-Christian belief system, a system that led to the vilification and domination of women.40 In the preface to her book, Merlin Stone asked: How did it actually happen? How did men initially gain the control . . .? As if in answer to our queries, yet another question presented itself. What else might we expect in a society that for centuries has taught young children, both, male and female, that a MALE deity created the universe and all that is in it, produced MAN in his own divine image— and then, as an afterthought, created woman, to obediently help man in his endeavours? The image of Eve, created for her husband, from her husband, the woman who was supposed to have brought about the downfall of humankind, has in many ways become the image of all women.41 Later, the author briefly presents the traits attributed to the figure of Lilith as an example of the patriarchal distortion of matriarchal myths.42 These kinds of texts and approaches have emerged in the context of a revision of academic wisdom, considered a direct result of patriarchal structures. The methods Stone and similar authors used to argue and construct their theories from an amalgam of personal feelings, intuitions, and history and mythology, were echoed by the pilgrims as they talked about their experiences.43 Speaking about the relationship she sees between Mary Magdalene and the Virgin, Margot, the Scottish woman adopted into a Catholic family, explained: I feel there is a kind of continuity, however broken or hidden at times. Continuity of this very deep, ancient, life-giving essence of the Mother and of women, you know, in the face of everything, in the face of all the power struggles and the battles and the politics. [I feel] that somewhere underneath it all, there is this earth that we walk upon and that we are the women who in some way carry life on. By caring for children, by doing laundry, by baking bread, you know that somewhere this is very strong . . . through many different periods of time and many different isms there has been incredible creativity around worshipping or venerating different faces of the Mother . . . The church we were in today, where there was a beautiful Virgin Mary standing on the crescent moon . . . that was wonderful, it was like the moon under her feet,44 it was like it could have been Isis and yet it was Mary the Madonna and [testified of] all the different faces [of the Goddess]. (October 2, 2005)

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For these pilgrims, in the triad of the Virgin Mary, Magdalene, and Eve the Virgin represented the dominated woman who had been deprived of her sexuality and even her corporality. Eve, on the opposite side, was the rebellious woman who initially defied the laws established by the male God but who finally had to submit to them. Mary Magdalene bore some similarities to both Eve and the Virgin Mary, but also represented a different, third model of femininity. Like Eve, she was linked to the pre-Christian Goddess religion, but, like Mary she loved Jesus and was present at the crucifixion. The variety of names and statues of the Madonna represented different feminine divinities for the pilgrims, each with her own personality and characteristics. These were usually related to certain places where the Virgin had appeared (like Lourdes, Fatima), to dark Madonna shrines (like Notre-Dame de Le-Puy) or to the most crucial moments of Mary’s life. The pilgrims were convinced that the way these different figures were represented by the Christian Church followed an ancient tradition inspired by the various goddesses of antiquity; like these goddesses, every Virgin had her own special role. Roger observed that NotreDame de la Garde, for example, was Athena-like because she was venerated at the top of a hill overlooking the sea and was believed to protect Marseille from invasions. Pilgrims wanted to strip away the layers that had served to hide the feminine power that important female Christian figures represented. To them, the Virgin Mary was not immaculate, not always loving and helpful, nor ready to follow God’s orders: Behind the layers, she was a powerful goddess. They believed that through the centuries there had been underground movements that had refused Christianity’s patriarchal approach. Christianity, denying both the body and darkness, was perceived as opposed to the Celtic tradition and to other preChristian indigenous traditions welcoming the interrelatedness of darkness and light, body and spirit.

Neoshamanism and the Reinterpretation of Indigenous Cultures Before continuing our exploration of the Magdalene pilgrimages, we will briefly consider here the two neoshamanic bodies of teachings Dana and Celso respectively relied upon. The pilgrims saw both these traditions as the expression of pre-Christian beliefs and practices fostering a positive conception of the body and the feminine, as well as a stronger connection with Mother Earth. Dana and Celso had several things in common. Both had been involved in Leftist political movements of their respective countries, both felt attracted by the transnational Neopagan movement and held workshops about sacred sexuality and both relied, during their pilgrimages, on a system of theories and ritual

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practices said to derive from the pre-Columbian wisdom of Native Americans. In both cases, the traditions they mentioned combined Christian elements with indigenous words and concepts: There was a non-Native spiritual teacher who, exceptionally, had been initiated into a spiritual tradition described as indigenous and had shared his or her wisdom with one of the two leaders. Celso had been a disciple of Juan Nuñez del Prado, a Peruvian anthropologist who claimed to be the first non-Indian to have received the teachings of an Andean priest, Don Benito. Dana had been the disciple of Clara and of Emilio Fiel, who both claimed to have been among the first Westerners to be initiated into the Conchero tradition by Nanita, one of the rare female leaders of this Mexican movement.45

Clara, Dana, and the Conchero Movement Clara was a vital, charismatic woman in her fifties, with long brown curly hair and shining dark eyes, who always dressed in a colorful and sensual way. She could often be found talking animatedly, telling stories, dancing, or singing. After separating from her husband, she lived in Ibiza with her daughter and worked as an artisan, selling her own handicrafts. Dana introduced her as a priestess who had been learning about the Conchero tradition for thirteen years; Dana and Purificación, a doctor working with holistic therapy who also accompanied the group, had been her disciples. When asked about her experience within the Conchero tradition, Clara told me that in the early 1990s she had traveled to Mexico in search of native spiritual wisdom. After some disappointing experiences, she was told to go and see an elder woman called Nanita, who was said to be a capitana of the Conchero movement. Nanita believed that the time had come to pass on the wisdom of the Concheros to Westerners, and Clara became her disciple. Once back in Spain, Clara became the point of connection between Nanita and Emilio Fiel. Fiel is a charismatic Spanish spiritual teacher, who worked to create a spiritual bridge between Mexico and Spain and, more generally, between Latin America and Europe. Clara began to travel to Mexico every year and was trained by Nanita as a malinche or female ritual assistant (detailed further below). Meanwhile, Fiel managed to expand his version of Conchero movement in Spain, and Conchero ceremonies were held annually in the shrines of Santiago de Compostela, the Virgin of Rocío in Andalusia, the Virgin of Pilar in Zaragoza46 (the patron of Spain), and the Black Madonna of Montserrat (the patron of Catalonia). Only some of the members of the Goddess Wood were also part of the Spanish Conchero movement, and among the pilgrims there were no committed Concheros. Some pilgrims, like Estrella and Felicia, occasionally attended the annual Conchero ceremonies in Montserrat. I attended some of the monthly meetings of the Conchero group in Barcelona in order to observe the ritual

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dances and attended a ceremony in Montserrat in May 2005, as did Dana and some of her pilgrims. The Concheros47 are traditional groups who perform ritual dances related to a popular religious cult in Mexico. Their name derives from a particular musical instrument called a concha that is similar to a guitar. Even though their existence is attested to only since the XVIII century, their traditions may date from the period of the colonial conquest of Mexico.48 There are different groups of Concheros holding more or less nationalistic ideals and extremist political positions, but they all follow a similar organizational system that to an outsider appears quite militaristic. A typical group has about thirty members organized around a mesa or cuartel general (headquarters). Here there is an altar with the most important figures of the Virgin and of Christ, along with ritual objects and instruments. The members of a group consider themselves descendants of a founder of the group’s lineage.49 Women play an important role among the Concheros, and among the group De la Peña describes as neo-Concheros the figure of La Malinche is especially important. Iberian neo-Concheros consider Nanita as their connection to the Mexican ancestors who founded the tradition. In 1992, the first Spanish Conchero headquarters was officially created in Santiago de Compostela with the hope and intention of awakening Christian mysticism through the Conchero tradition.50 The country house near Zaragoza where Dana held the most important initiation ceremony within the Goddess Wood for Candlemas was also such a Conchero headquarter. There, in a small, separate building, I saw the Conchero altar displaying some of the objects previously mentioned and a picture of Nanita, considered the lineage founder.51 In the hierarchy of the group, after the captain there is the second captain and then the sergeant. For the women, the highest level possible in theory is that of malinche. There are several types of malinche, but Clara did not specify which kind of malinche she herself was. She mostly referred to the tasks of the malinche as related to the burning of the copal (aromatic plant) in the sahumador (incense burner). At the start of a ceremonial dance, an altar-cloth is placed in the middle of the circle formed by the dancers and ritual objects such as the sahumador, musical instruments and ceremonial sticks are placed upon it. During the evening gatherings of Dana’s group at the Sainte-Baume, the central altar around which the women sat was said to have been prepared following the Conchero tradition (see figure 5.1). The Christian symbol of the cross is interpreted by the Concheros as the expression of the four directions and the four elements of the cosmos (fire, water, wind, earth). These elements were invoked during Dana’s rituals when she used a ritual gesture said to derive from the Conchero tradition that involved tracing the two symbols of the cross and of the infinite (∞) into the air. Dana had learned the basic theories and practices of the Conchero tradition from Clara. Unlike Celso, Dana did not feel that she had received complete training,

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and she did not consider herself a malinche. She felt committed to fostering the return of the Goddess in Spain and was principally concerned with theories deriving from feminist spirituality. Celso, on the other hand, had become by 2003 an Andean priest, having received the teachings of the Andean tradition since 1998 as they had been passed on to him by Juan Nuñez del Prado.

Juan, Celso, and the Andean Tradition In 2002, after I decided to center my thesis on spiritual journeys related to Mary Magdalene, I received Celso’s newsletter announcing a pilgrimage related to Mary Magdalene and I immediately signed up for it. I had known Celso for four years and participated in other trips and workshops he had led. Celso, who had traveled through Peru for many years learning about different shamanic traditions, told me that he considered the techniques of the Andean tradition taught by Juan to be very useful and that he had therefore decided to bring them to a wider public. However, he acknowledged that they were by no means common to all Peruvian indigenous groups, let alone those of other Andean countries. Celso also knew that Juan had adapted the techniques he had learned from Don Benito to make them accessible to a broader range of people in the West. Juan’s teachings had achieved popularity in Europe through Elizabeth B. Jenkins’s novel Initiation (1997), which became a bestseller in Italy in the late 1990s. The American author describes her meeting with Juan and her experiences during a Hatun Karpay, a long sequence of initiatory rituals created by the anthropologist, apparently following Don Benito’s indications.52 The basic principles could be summarized as follows.53 Everything is made of living energy (kausay). This living energy can be perceived as light energy (samiy) or heavy energy (jucha). Human beings are the only beings able to control the flow of energy and can decide to stop the flow, thereby creating heavy energy. This energy is not negative or bad and can be released to Mother Earth (Pachamana in Quechua) who receives this energy as a nurturing gift. The main energy techniques taught by Juan, described in more detail in the following chapter, consisted of receiving samiy, the light energy, through a process called saminchakuy and digesting jucha, the heavy energy, through a process called juchamijui. Another technique (saiwachakuy) consisted in creating a column of energy and sending energy to persons and places in need of it. Juan also taught in his workshops how to prepare an offering to Mother Earth, a pago or despacho for the Pachamama, and with the workshop participants made an exchange of personal power (karpay ayni). As in the case of the Conchero movement, Juan talked about the coming of a new age related to the year 2012 referring to a prophecy about the return of the Inca.54 There were other elements the two neo-Indian movements had in

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common. Both spoke of indigenous teachers who decided to share their beliefs with non-Indians and of the importance of creating a bridge between Latin America and Europe. They maintained that the pre-Columbian civilizations they referred to (the Incas for Juan, the Mayas and Aztecs for Clara) did not practice human sacrifices, but lived in a society marked by a strong sense of spirituality and political and ritual equality between men and women. Unlike Clara and Emilio Fiel, who emphasized the importance of women and of a return of the Feminine, Juan did not attribute much importance to this aspect and this was the cause of several impassioned arguments between Juan and Celso.55 * * * Since the publication of Carlos Castaneda’s first book56 in 1968, many European and North American Don Juan seekers like Celso have traveled to Mexico or other Latin American countries in search of a native shaman who could introduce them into the secret knowledge of indigenous people. Some of these seekers propagate these native teachings in their home countries through publications, workshops and web sites. Juan, Clara, and Emilio Fiel had found respectively in Don Benito and Nanita the native teachers they were looking for, and had translated their teachings under the pretext of making it more accessible to Westerners. They assumed a role similar to that of cultural mediators normally attributed to anthropologists and borrowed not only native terms but also anthropological terms, adapting their meanings according to their needs. Dana and Celso had learned this previously translated version and further adapted it for their own teaching. Neither Dana nor Celso had ever met Nanita, and Don Benito and their knowledge relied on the mediation of Clara and Emilio Fiel (for Nanita) and Juan Nuñez Del Prado (for Don Benito). Given Celso’s and Dana’s spiritual feminist ideals, they used the native ritual elements and gestures during the pilgrimage mostly to foster a connection with Mother Earth and the Sacred Feminine. The presence of native and anthropological terms in Dana’s and Celso’s discourse conferred authority on their explanations and legitimated them in their role of mediators between the Native world and their Western audience. For them the efficacy of the rituals they proposed justified not only their borrowing but also their adaptation. The Native cosmovision and rituals appeared as allies in the pilgrims’ and the leaders’ battle against the destructive power of patriarchy and its ally, the Church, which they felt had systematically wiped out preChristian beliefs and rituals first in Europe and later in the Americas. The fact that neoshamans appropriate not only the role of the cultural mediator (normally the prerogative of anthropologists) but also technical terms such as “rite of passage” or “coming of age ceremony” led to fierce criticism from anthropologists. They and other professionals working for the protection and emancipation of Native groups accuse neoshamans of taking native beliefs and practices out of their original context, attributing them a different meaning and using them for their own benefit.57

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In their study of the neo-Indians in Peru and Mexico, Jacques Galinier and Antoinette Molinié have shown the political use that local authorities make of these kind of neo-Indian theories.58 They show how non-Indians manipulate Indian beliefs and practices without actually involving indigenous people or sharing the political and/or economic advantages they obtain with them. In Peru and Mexico some indigenous people actually collaborate with the neo-Indians, trying to obtain at least some economic benefit from their activities and often adapting their own practices. Neopagans in the United States are familiar with criticism of their borrowing and their politics of cultural appropriation from ancient and non-Christian religions.59 In trying to distance themselves from their original Jewish, Christian or atheist family backgrounds, they lose access to the religious traditions they came from, but they do not “completely belong to their adopted religion, whose communities may not accept them.”60 They are accused by anthropologists like Wendy Rose of stealing the cultural property of native communities, thereby recreating the process of dispossession that already took place with colonization.61 Advocates of the North and Central American Indians described by Sarah Pike seem to resist this process of borrowing more vigorously than their South American counterparts, and have challenged popular authors like Carlos Castaneda or Lynn Andrews, who claim to speak for Native peoples.62 For Neopagans, identity is not necessarily rooted in community, place, tradition, and family, as they see cultural identities as malleable and fluid.63 Like Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims, Neopagans want to distinguish themselves from New Agers and from Christians alike: Neopagans invoke the same criticisms of the New Age Movement that Native Americans direct at all non-Native borrowers: financial exploitation and the lack of “authenticity.” Neopagans distance themselves from the negative characteristics they identify with the New Age Movement, then want to align themselves with what they see as the desirable characteristics of Native American cultures. They enter into conversations about borrowing with the assumption that American Indian cultures embody the qualities they believe Christianity and European cultures lack: Indians are close to nature and the seasonal cycles; they are respectful of women; they have feminine images of the divine .  .  . and they value the body and sexuality as sacred aspects of human experience.64 When participating in Native American ceremonies, Pike’s Neopagans often reject the separation of men and women in purification ceremonies and modest views of the human body. Appropriating native beliefs and rituals, Neopagans, like the Magdalene pilgrims, modify them to suit their own beliefs about feminism, ecology and multiculturalism.65

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Whereas American Neopagans mostly borrow from Native American cultures from North and Central America, Catalan and Spanish people interested in feminist spirituality and neoshamanism are more attracted by native traditions from Central and South America, especially Mexico and Peru, former Spanish colonies. One of the reasons for this might well be the common language, but I often heard the pilgrims say that because of Spanish colonization, these countries and cultures seemed more familiar to them. Sometimes I was told by Spanish and Catalans practicing neoshamanism that as the descendants of colonialists, they felt that they needed to try to do something positive to make up for the horrors their ancestors inflicted and to reestablish the credibility and value of the indigenous people living in those areas. Sharing their theories and practices appeared a way to honor these cultures and begin to heal the wounds created by colonization. Iberian and Italian pilgrims, and the wider set of people I met and spoke to during workshops, conferences, and events such as the yearly Earth Fair in Barcelona, were less conscious about the polemical issues related to cultural borrowing than Neopagans and spiritual feminists in the United States. The Neopagan and feminist spirituality movements are less common and therefore also less visible in Italy or Spain. Neopagan or feminist spirituality groups like Goddess Wood tended to have little contact with other like-minded groups, and therefore rarely have the opportunity to discuss their theories and practices with others or to test them in a wider context.

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The Sainte-Baume and Its Many Layers

The warm sun of the Provençal summer lit up the dining hall of the Hôtellerie, where the Italian pilgrims gathered for breakfast on their first morning. At Celso’s invitation, the early risers had attended morning lauds and were telling the rest about the beautiful singing of the nuns and the frescos in the chapel. Other, Catholic, pilgrims were eating breakfast, chatting and helping the nuns to clear the tables. Later, walking along the gravel road toward the wood, the Italians with their backpacks did not look so different from the groups of Catholic pilgrims I had seen on previous days. At the entrance to the wood, where a sign requested silence and respect for nature, Celso stopped to explain its history. Scattered at the edge of the forest, the pilgrims listened as Celso told them that the wood had existed well before the rise of Christianity. One of the most ancient forests in France, it had been considered sacred by the Celts. Only Druids, Celtic priests, were allowed to cut its trees. The Druids celebrated their rituals here surrounded by oaks, yews, and beeches, trees particularly significant to the Celtic tradition. The mountain itself was geologically unusual in that the higher strata were more ancient than the lower.1 An experienced student of the tarot, Celso compared the geological structure of the place with the card of the Hanged Man. On this card a man is pictured dangling upside down, with his feet pointing toward the sky and his head toward the earth. Celso said that this card represented a total revolution of preconceived ideas, norms, and values: The persons who picked this card should expect to experience an upheaval in their lives. Celso suggested that the mountain likewise indicated the possibility of radical changes in the lives of those who chose to visit it. Here as at other stops Celso interpreted the geological and topographical traits of the area in terms of their energetic effects on the individual, referring to an esoteric body of knowledge he identified as geography of the spirit or sacred geography. Those following its precepts could recognize and feel the energetic potential of a place by interpreting the signs written on it, reading its natural traits. Celso observed that this area was a major water reserve with many springs and caves. Both springs and caves were linked to feminine forces, to the figure of the Great Mother, symbolizing fertility, birth, and rebirth. The earthy humidity 83

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of the wood contrasted with the dry, sunny and windy masculine part higher up in the rocks, combining the four elements that sustained life: water, earth, fire (sun), and air (wind). For all these reasons, this was a perfect place to connect with one’s inner female and male part and to experience a spiritual rebirth. Celso also linked the particular geophysical features of the Sainte-Baume with the history of its occupants and with Magdalene’s life there. For centuries, people who were able to recognize and read the special features of the landscape or to feel its energy and potential had been attracted to this place. It was no wonder, he said, that Mary Magdalene recognized the healing power of the Sainte-Baume and decided to live there. Drawing on his background in Jungian psychology, Celso described forests as places representing trial and initiation, with unknown and obscure dangers. To enter this forest meant to pass through a door to the unknown, the kingdom of the dead and the shadows, the place of the secrets of nature and its spirits, and the world of the unconscious. One withdrew to the forest to experience a symbolic death and a spiritual rebirth. Sheltered from the rest of the world, one could get in touch with the unconscious and the instinctive, as represented by nature and animals, yet feel protected and contained as if in the maternal womb. As a space beyond human laws and collective rules, the forest allowed seekers to discover and experience their own unique identities and explore the fears that might be associated with these identities. The Italian pilgrims now felt prepared for an adventure of self-discovery. Unlike the Catholic pilgrims entering the wood, they had been told what they might experience and had some points of reference. Knowing about the secret meanings related to trees, woods and springs, they entered both the physical forest and a “forest of symbols.”2

Entering a Sacred Space In preparing to enter sacred space, Italian pilgrims passed through a short ritual of limpia, a Spanish word meaning “cleansing.” Limpia is a word widely used in Central and South America to define a process of spiritual purification, for example the casting away of evil spirits. In this case Celso used a procedure from the Andean tradition to clear heavy energy, involving the mesa, a ritual object specific to Juan Nuñez Del Prado’s disciples. The mesa consisted of a handwoven cloth made by Q’ero Indians of the Cuzco region3 containing power objects, each charged with a particular kind of energy. In this case Celso invited the pilgrims to use also three other cleansing ritual objects that were not included in the limpia process as taught by Juan. This ritual was to allow them to leave behind any fear, sorrow, pain, or other strong emotions that might prevent them from experiencing the spiritual

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transformation offered by the wood and its sacred places. Four volunteers, two men and two women, surrounded the pilgrim holding an incense stick, a magic wand, and a pair of Tibetan bells along with a ritual bag (mesa) to perform the limpia. The smoke of the incense, the passing of the wand, the sounds of the bells, and the physical touch of the mesa on the body were meant to help the pilgrim to get rid of the trapped heavy energy. The idea was that the heavy energy would leave the person’s energetic field and fall down to Mother Earth. In this limpia ritual we can see many of the typical characteristics of the rituals created by Celso and Dana (and sometimes by single pilgrims for their own personal use). The pilgrims knew how the ritual was supposed to work and what were its expected outcomes; they roughly knew the structure and details of the ritual. The ritual implied a mixture of preexisting features (supposedly linked to an indigenous shamanic tradition) and other elements added spontaneously according to the circumstances. The corporeal dimension was particularly important, and apart from the physical body the ritual especially influences the energetic body, also described as personal energetic field or aura. Most of the Italian pilgrims had attended one or more of Celso’s workshops and were therefore comfortable with terms like limpia and mesa. Like the Swedish neoshamans described by Galina Lindquist, Celso’s pilgrims, but also those from the other groups, validated the efficacy of their rituals by basing it on their bodily experience and incorporating the rituals’ healing effects in their personal narratives.4 I will introduce terms and ideas related to Celso’s teachings, as well as some more general notions that help explain the theories and rituals of all the Magdalene pilgrims I met. I refer to Celso’s theories about energy and the techniques he taught in his workshops, because he was the most open to discussing his methods related to energy techniques. Neither Roger nor Dana ever spoke explicitly about energy techniques, even if their pilgrims clearly used them and were often invited to connect themselves with certain places and to feel the energy of certain rocks or trees but also of meta-empirical entities such as Mary Magdalene or the spirits of the wood. When I asked Roger why he did not give precise indications about the energy techniques to be used, he told me that he assumed that the pilgrims already had the basic know-how that could allow them to fully profit from the power places they visited. He seemed to be right, because the English-speaking pilgrims all had quite rich backgrounds in spiritual matters and seemed to know exactly what to do when they wanted to connect with the energy of a place. In Dana’s case, she kept repeating throughout the journey that the simple fact of being among women, traveling with different rhythms, and participating in rituals would be a transforming experience in itself, independent of their previous knowledge and skills. According to the pilgrims, the world was permeated by a living force identified as energy. They sometimes cited a simplified version of Einstein’s principle

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by saying that energy is not created and is not destroyed, but simply transforms itself. Every being is surrounded by its own energetic field, and the energy held around each person’s body was said to consist of seven layers and might vary in size. These and the following notions derived from books belonging to the vast literature on spiritual healing5 and from workshops. The well being of people was believed to depend on the quality and quantity of energy contained inside their auras. There were many different types of energy, but the basic distinction was that of positive and negative energy. Energy techniques helped people to receive positive energy and release negative energy. Positive energy was perceived as a nurturing and healing force one could absorb from the outside world, through particular power places, plants, animals, or humans. In this particular case, pilgrims could benefit from the energy of the Sainte-Baume, a power place whose slopes were covered by an ancient forest and inhabited by plants and animals. The pilgrims believed that negative energy was normally released to and absorbed by the earth, which then transformed it just as it transformed and recycled all natural processes. The presence of negative energy in a person’s energy field manifested itself through psychological or physical problems and behavior. Its removal could gradually expel negative experiences in the body and the psyche, such as physical or mental illness. Avoiding value judgments about positivity and negativity, the followers of the Andean tradition preferred to talk of light and heavy energy. Whatever the terminology used, the common idea underlying this distinction between positive/light energy and negative/heavy energy was that people are surrounded by unseen forces that affect their general well being. The following points sum up Celso’s teachings about a world made of living energy and relate it to the more general vision of all the pilgrims: The phenomenological world is made of living energy that is in constant movement. Each living being possesses an energy field that is like an invisible bubble surrounding the visible body. There exist different types of energy, and everything, from living beings to inanimate objects, has its own particular quality of energy. There is a basic distinction between qualities of energy—that is, between positive/light and negative/heavy energy. Positive energy is nurturing for human beings, negative energy has harmful effects that can manifest themselves through psychological or physical problems. With the appropriate techniques, each person can learn to take care of the well being of her energy field. The wellbeing of the physical body is directly connected to that of the energy body.

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There are techniques that allow nourishing and healing energy from the outside world to enter one’s aura and others that help to release draining or destructive energy from one’s energy field. There are particular objects that help to manage and direct the flow of energy, such as power objects that condense inside themselves the personal power of their owner. In the context of these theories, the people who were aware of and equipped to tap into the potential of such energies were clearly more powerful than those who were not. In contrast to other practicing Catholic pilgrims or tourists visiting the Sainte-Baume, the Italian pilgrims, who believed that this was a power place of stored energy, could use it consciously for their own spiritual and physical benefit. Roger had participated in a Hatun Karpay journey led by Juan, and had been impressed by Juan’s capacity to integrate Jungian psychology, anthropological theories and indigenous wisdom. Dana’s and Roger’s groups had not been taught a specific technique for receiving or dispelling energy by their leaders. Nevertheless, when they spoke of feeling or receiving energy there were some recurrent features that corresponded to the basics of Celso’s theories and techniques. All Italian pilgrims knew the energy techniques taught by Celso, with the sole exception of Augusto, the youngest Italian pilgrim. His experience with Celso and other Italian pilgrims was therefore useful in gaining insight into the process of learning to deal with energy. After his first day at the Sainte-Baume, Augusto was not quite sure whether he had received the light energy properly because he had not been able to feel it in his physical or energetic body. The other pilgrims reassured him that soon, with regular practice, he would be able to clearly perceive the currents of energy as well as they did. They compared the process to that of learning a new skill, such as riding a bike. At the beginning, one was too focused on doing it properly to notice the surrounding landscape or to pay attention to other things. But step by step, one became more confident and relaxed, both able to ride the bike and to pay attention to what was going on all around. Finally, one could ride the bike and do different things simultaneously without even noticing it. Cyclists, for example, watch out for other vehicles to avoid accidents, enjoy the scenery, or converse with a companion. Gradually, pilgrims told him, he would receive or release energy easily; he would then be able to pay attention to the feelings and sensations that manifested during these exercises and would have no more doubts about whether he had done the process properly or not. As it emerges from this example, the bodily perception of energy is a crucial element that allows transition from the field of faith to that of experience. As we see here and also in other ethnographic examples, the conceptualization of the surrounding world in terms of energy implies a sort of empowerment for the

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individual who becomes gradually autonomous in establishing a contact with energy and in putting to test the efficacy of certain power places or rituals. Through energy the person feels no longer isolated from but connected with the surrounding world and can develop a stronger link with her or his physical body, with other people, and with the environment. The physical perception of energy also offers a proof of the existence of the divine, because energy is interpreted in this context as the manifestation of an immanent divine force that allows and sustains life. Through the reference to energy the divine passes from the domain of transcendence to immanence, from the domain of faith to that of experience. For this reason the energy discourse allows a reinterpretation of Catholic figures, rituals, and symbols that questions most basic assumptions of Christianity.6

Redeeming the Sins, Releasing the Heavy Energy On the way up to the cave of the Sainte-Baume, Celso created a sense of continuity between past and present pilgrims to the cave by giving information about the historical background of the pilgrimage and the spiritual exercises associated with it. He compared the current energy techniques used by today’s pilgrims to the practices of penance and elevation used by earlier Catholic pilgrims. By providing this context, he made the present pilgrimage and its practices appear not something radically new, but rather the result of a historical process of adaptation. Once every pilgrim had passed through the limpia, the cleansed group entered the wood. Celso told them that in the Middle Ages the Sainte-Baume was an obligatory stop on the route to Santiago for pilgrims coming through France. He said that medieval pilgrims climbed up to the cave, which symbolized Christ’s sepulcher, and experienced there a spiritual death and rebirth. And then that they walked on up to the Saint-Pilon chapel, which symbolized the place from where Magdalene was raised to heaven, and circled it nine times. This practice gave them the right to plenary indulgence: the remission of all their sins. Rejecting the Christian concept of sin, Celso interpreted this purification process in terms of energy, inviting the pilgrims to follow the steps and practices of their medieval predecessors. Sin was one of the main Judeo-Christian concepts to be criticized by alternative spirituality and other movements related to Neopaganism. In a world seen as made out of energy, the concepts of sin or salvation were explained in terms of heavy and light energy. Sin could be understood, according to Celso, as heavy energy that prevented the individual from developing an attitude of openness toward life, and trust and love toward other living beings. Salvation did not require guilt or repentance, but the acceptance of the release of heavy energy and an attitude of being open to the possibility of

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transformation. If one accepted this paradigm, no physical suffering or sacrifice was needed for a pilgrimage to be transformational. Some pilgrims told me that Jesus himself had negated the concept of original sin when he affirmed that his death had redeemed Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. A parallel between Eve and Magdalene emerged in their discourse here: If Eve had witnessed and even provoked the fall of mankind, Magdalene had witnessed the death and resurrection of Jesus and the redemption of humanity’s sins through Christ.7 In Celso’s interpretation of penance we can observe a process of progressive rejection of the exaltation of suffering in a Christian context already observed by Talal Asad: “What the Christian believes today about God, life after death, universe, is not what he believed a millennium ago—nor is the way he responds to ignorance, pain, and injustice the same now as it was then. The medieval valorization of pain as the mode of participating in Christ’s suffering contrasts sharply with the modern Catholic perception of pain as an evil to be fought against and overcome as Christ the Healer did.”8 Pain emerges as a sort of evil also from the energy discourse that describes physical and psychological pain as the manifestation of a lack of balance or free flow of energy. Even if the pilgrims tried to distinguish and even oppose their own theories and rituals to those of Christianity, they often ended up reproducing discourses and practices observed in contemporary Christian movements.9 According to Celso, Catholic pilgrims of the past did penance by approaching Magdalene’s cave with a heavy weight on their shoulders or going on their knees. Celso’s pilgrims were to approach the cave in quite a different way that did not involve suffering or penance. Everybody chose a small stone from the forest and carried it up. The pilgrims were instructed to pass on their heavy energy to the stone, which would become a temporary recipient and concrete symbol of the person’s troubles and fears. By leaving the stone, the pilgrim would release the heavy energy inside the cave as an offering to Mother Earth. Slowly pilgrims found the appropriate stone and made their way up to the cave. Celso chose the steeper and more difficult way up, the Chemin du Canapé, a rather narrow path that cut right through the wood. Admiring the thick wood and the big white rocks that sometimes emerged from it, the pilgrims spread along the way, falling into small groups. Celso passed from one cluster to another, answering questions and giving extra explanation. Pilgrims considered Celso’s knowledge important, receiving it eagerly and trading it with each other. I was the only one of the group apart from its leader who had been to the cave before, and was occasionally asked about the length of the walk or the feelings I had had when I first entered the cave. I tried to speak as little as possible about my own feelings in order not to influence them and instead asked them about their own ideas and perceptions. It seemed that in order to release one’s heavy energy, one did not need to be totally focused on the process. As the pilgrims carried their stone, they played

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with little Sathya, a two-years old pilgrim, who was on his father’s back; they made jokes, discussed books they had read about Mary Magdalene, and shared their past spiritual experiences. Whereas the limpia process implied the use of elements thought to remove heavy energy (incense smoke, magic wands, etc.), this time Celso’s pilgrims used a concrete external object to act as an intermediary between them and the alltransforming being identified as Mother Earth. As opposed to the khuyas, the objects contained in the mesa that were permanently charged with light energy and maintained it inside themselves, the individually chosen stones only acted as a temporary recipient for the pilgrim’s transferred heavy energy until they were deposed inside the cave and released to Mother Earth. Stone was said to be an ideal vehicle for this process as it could store heavy as well as light energy. Stones, rocks, and caves were all perceived as elements strongly linked to Mother Earth and as having a particular capacity to work as intermediary agents for human beings wanting to connect to her. During their trip pilgrims theoretically released their heavy energy to stones, rocks, and caves, but also received the light energy stored inside a rock or stone. This process of giving and receiving energy was constant during the pilgrimages. In this ritual we can see another characteristic of Celso’s but also of the other pilgrims’ ritual practices: the presence of a constant process of exchange. While visiting the places of their spiritual tours the pilgrims repeatedly received new elements, thereby letting go of old ones. This could happen in terms of light and heavy energy but also in terms of objects or behavioral patterns. Pilgrims would take an object from a certain place and leave there another object belonging to them, or receive insight about new positive attitudes they should introduce in their lives and thereby let go of old behavioral patterns perceived as outdated or even harmful. In this sense each ritual they performed implied a certain healing process, a passage from a previous to a new state perceived as better. At a point halfway up to the cave, there were some large white rocks at the side of the Chemin du Canapé. Celso explained that they formed a natural dolmen and were a perfect catalyst for the telluric forces of the place. He said that the telluric currents of energy that run through the mountain were captured by the dolmen and that each pilgrim should lie down on the earth inside it and receive the healing energy stored there. Just as each pilgrim’s stone stored their heavy energy, these rocks stored and passed on Mother Earth’s light, telluric, and nurturing energy. One by one pilgrims lay down inside the huge white boulders, closing their eyes and opening up to receive the energy. From time to time, one could hear sighs or other sounds expressing relief or well being coming from the dolmen. While little Sathya was breastfed by his mother not far from the dolmen, some pilgrims wandered around the place in order to take pictures or have a snack. Others sat down near the boulders, their eyes closed, and consciously tried to

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connect with the energy of the place using energy techniques discussed above. Celso had asked people to limit their stay inside the dolmen so that everybody could have the same opportunity. Nevertheless, one or two pilgrims stayed for a longer time inside the dolmen, causing complaints. Celso did not say anything and waited until everybody had finished to move on. Pilgrims emerging from the dolmen, which looked like a stone sepulcher, seemed relaxed and happy. Most of them said that they would have wanted to stay there longer. Once again, on their way up to the cave, pilgrims compared notes on the experiences and feelings they had had inside the dolmen. Some said they felt a sense of empowerment. Others likened their feelings inside the dolmen to connecting to energy in other places of power during Celso’s workshops and trips. As some pilgrims walked faster than others, the group divided in two. The first group followed Celso and a second slower group brought up the rear. Relying on my knowledge of the place, pilgrims of this slower group took their time to rest or explore trees and rocks that attracted their interest. Shortly before the path joined the main way, the Chemin des Rois (the Way of the Kings), pilgrims of the second group caught up with some from the first who were standing with closed eyes in between two immense walls of white rock. Once the pilgrims came out from this natural corridor made of rocks, they explained, partly paraphrasing Celso, that this too was a place for receiving energy, like the dolmen. The corridor allowed several pilgrims at once to stay between the two huge rocks and to receive the energy simultaneously. Celso said there were some telluric currents, probably two, that originated on the top of the mountain. These ran down the slopes of the Sainte-Baume passing through certain crucial points: Mary Magdalene’s cave, the rocky corridor, and finally the dolmen. To identify this telluric system, Celso relied upon his own feelings when visiting the place, the general configuration of the forest, and the particular shape of certain rocks. He had been there several times and said that he could point out the places that were important. On the slopes of the mountain there also were other powerful places Celso knew about, but we did not have time to visit them all. Celso’s way of describing and interpreting the mountain and the forest of the Sainte-Baume as a sacred landscape allowed the pilgrims to experience the place as an arena where the Catholic interpretative system overlaid with a corpus of theories that I will call here the energetic system. On the mountain, particular spots were gateways to a powerful connection with the energies of the place. One of these gateways, the cave, coincided with a location considered to be sacred by the Catholic church as well. Other spots, such as the alleged dolmen and the rocky corridor, were not relevant to the Catholic belief system and were supposedly known to Celso’s group alone. The fact that Celso spoke of a dolmen led pilgrims to speculate about whether the Celts had known about the healing effects of this spot. This created a putative connection between the former Celtic

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inhabitants of the ancient forest and the modern pilgrims, putting the latter into a historical continuum that reached back beyond the Catholic to pre-Christian and pre-Roman roots. Bearing in mind the associations Celso had given them when entering the wood, pilgrims were now prepared to arrive at the cave: the place that both the Catholic and the energetic system recognized as a place of power and healing.

Celso’s Rituals Inside the Cave The cave of the Sainte-Baume represented a particularly powerful gateway for connecting with the healing power of Mother Earth because its sacredness was recognized by all three systems: the Celtic, the Catholic, and Celso’s energetic system, which considered it a place to commune with Mother Earth and with Mary Magdalene. As we will see, the pilgrims from the three groups reacted in different ways to the fact that the cave had been made into a church and Dominican friars celebrated their masses there each day. The humid cave was perceived by most of the Magdalene pilgrims of all three groups as the symbol of their own mother’s womb, a place of nurturing and of birth. They also felt inside the womb of Mother Earth, often described as Cosmic Mother, from which everything had derived and to which everything would return. Like the Goddess who gave life but also took it away, this was a place of birth and death. It reminded pilgrims of their own mortality and that dying would return them to the Earth. To Celso’s pilgrims, the cave also appeared, following their leader’s words, as a symbol of the Sepulcher of Christ, where they would experience a symbolic death and rebirth. The Italian pilgrims learned to be attentive to the symbols surrounding them and the significance of their actions. They knew what they would do and how it was supposed to work before actually beginning the experience:10 Entering into the cave should mark a sort of spiritual death, and emerging from the cave the pilgrims should experience some sort of rebirth. This strategy of making explicit the way energy techniques and rituals worked on a symbolic level and what kind of effects one could anticipate was also used in Dana’s group. Roger, on the other hand, deliberately tried not to create particular expectations in his group before visiting a site. He merely brought them to the sites he felt to be powerful and allowed them to open up to their own personal experience of the place without preconceptions. As he explained, “my job is to bring you to the place and explain it to you; the experience depends on you.” At the cave entrance, in the midst of French tourists and pilgrims entering and leaving, the Italian group heard Celso explain what would be done inside. Susanna, who helped Celso to organize the pilgrimage, was having her period and following Celso’s suggestion on the previous night, she had brought some of

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her menstrual blood on a tissue. She chose a spot in the cave to leave this as an intimate gift from the whole group, a female homage to Mother Earth.11 The pilgrims offered their stones to Mother Earth in a spot they had chosen inside the cave; then they gathered again to join the ritual of anointment with spikenard oil. Costanza, a psychologist and healer in her forties, asked to be the anointer. Embodying Mary Magdalene’s energy in this role, she was to pass it on to each pilgrim through the ritual act. Costanza was told to stand near the spring inside the cave, just under a huge marble statue of Mary Magdalene being lifted up to the sky by angels (see figure 3.1). She was to connect herself with the energy of the saint, acting as her receptacle. Then she would anoint each pilgrim with her own spontaneous gestures, so that Magdalene’s energy flowed into each pilgrim’s body. Only half a meter from the candles lit in honor of Mary Magdalene’s statue by other visitors, Costanza took the spikenard oil Celso had brought with him and closed her eyes. After a few minutes, she invited the pilgrims to approach. Unnoticed by the Dominican friars, she put both palms on each pilgrim’s head in order to transmit Magdalene’s energy and then put oil on the pilgrims’

Figure 3.1 In the cave of the Sainte-Baume, a marble statue of Mary Magdalene being taken to heaven by angels. Photo by Eric Charpentier, with his permission.

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foreheads. The other visitors did not seem to pay much attention. The strong scent of the spikenard oil filled the pilgrims’ nostrils while they were receiving Magdalene’s energy from Costanza. Here again we can see the typical features of the pilgrims’ way of ritualizing in Celso’s group and in the others: the importance of the bodily dimension (intended in its double dimension of physical and energetic body), the exchange of energy and the mixture between preexisting ritual elements and actions (the anointment), and others added according to circumstance and feelings (in this case by Costanza’s energy perceptions). Once anointed, each pilgrim went to another part of the cave and sat down for a while with closed eyes, lit a candle, or took some photos. Sheltered by the humid and dark atmosphere of this cave-church, pilgrims could perform their little personal ritual acts, receiving energy from a particular spot or praying for loved ones. After listening to a friar’s explanations about the church and Mary Magdalene, the pilgrims went to the small souvenir shop run by the Dominicans just outside the cave and bought postcards, little crosses, or Magdalene medals. They had lunch sitting in the courtyard of the convent in front of the cave, talking and exchanging food and drinks. I wondered if after listening to the friar they could still remember that while leaving the cold, humid, and dark cave they were supposed to be reborn from Mother Earth’s womb, stepping out into the sunlight of the warm summer sun into a new life. On this and several other occasions it was clear that the person most deeply concerned about the ritual processes and the proper way to act at each step was neither leader nor pilgrim, but rather the anthropologist. For the Italians and the rest of the Magdalene pilgrims there seemed to be no such a thing as a right or wrong way to do the pilgrimage or to experience the rituals. Any method served as long as the pilgrim tried to be involved in the process and to open up to its outcome. Some Italian pilgrims had left the church consciously focusing on the experience of rebirth, while others had seemingly forgotten about it. The latter concluded that they felt good and that the relevance of these kind of energetic practices was whether they worked or not. The important thing was the result, even if one was not totally conscious of the process itself. They felt that they had been reborn again, even if at the moment they emerged from the cave they had not been thinking about it. Even though pilgrims were supposed to know the meaning and the effects of the rituals and exercises beforehand and had been well prepared, they often did not seem to bear them in mind while performing them. On other occasions, the pilgrims’ rituals created fragmented and often contradictory meanings. As in the case of the Puja ritual analyzed by Humphrey and Laidlaw, pilgrims adapted the ritual frame put down by the leaders to their personal needs.12 Some enacted rituals with a playful attitude, just to see what happened.

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The leaders were aware of these approaches and did not condemn them. On the contrary, Celso and Roger in particular explicitly invited the pilgrims not to take spiritual issues too seriously and to allow themselves to play with them.

Elevation at Saint-Pilon In the afternoon the group went down the steps that led from the cave back to the main path, the Chemin des Rois. As they began to climb up the narrow path toward the chapel of Saint-Pilon, Celso took control of the group and of the daily spiritual program. Running through the entire sequence of the day, he reminded the pilgrims that after letting go of their heavy energy inside the cave they had finished the process of purification and received Magdalene’s energy through anointment. Emerging from the cave, they should have experienced a symbolic rebirth from Mother Earth’s womb. The newborn pilgrims were now climbing up to Saint-Pilon for a process of elevation that could only now take place after their purification and rebirth. At the chapel at the top, they would walk nine times around it, each time releasing a form of attachment they felt to be limiting in their lives. When they finished, they would experience elevation, the feeling of being lifted up to the skies as Mary Magdalene was. Once again, the pilgrims had been given a guide to the meaning of their actions and a protocol of procedures to follow. They knew how they were expected to feel, what they would do in the immediate future and how these future actions were supposed to affect them. Pilgrims had gradually learned how to interpret certain characteristics of the wood and how to relate in a different way to Catholic shrines, figures, and practices. Their walking up from the Hôtellerie to the cave and then to the chapel above unfolded step by step as a path of initiation. Their progression through space was accompanied by a constant traveling through time. Pilgrims were projected back to their first home in the maternal womb and their birth, and then into the future to imagining their physical death. There was a constant coming and going through different epochs of history and of their current and even past lives. This kind of time traveling happened in all three organized groups and was fostered by the leaders’ explanations, but also by their reference to texts. From time to time, the leaders would read aloud from books about Mary Magdalene, particularly on themes related to her image or to the visited places. This allowed another authoritative voice to enter the scene and created a moment of reflection among pilgrims. On the way up, pilgrims took a rest from the heat at the side of the steep path while Celso read them a section from Daniel MeuroisGivaudan’s 2000 book The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, about Magdalene’s life at the Sainte-Baume. Most of the Spanish and Italian pilgrims had read Meurois and his former wife’s Anne Givaudan’s channeled information about Jesus and

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Mary Magdalene.13 Being transported back to the time of the historical Jesus, pilgrims could suddenly see the Sainte-Baume through Mary Magdalene’s eyes. At the end of the steep way leading up to Saint-Pilon, the view suddenly opened out and the esplanade at the top of Sainte-Baume’s mountain became visible. From the chapel, one could see all the surrounding area and glimpse the Mediterranean at the horizon (see figure 3.2). Built near the border of the steep slope of the mountain, the chapel was surrounded by a stone wall. Italian pilgrims began to walk clockwise around the chapel, focusing each time on an attachment they wanted to release. Celso explained that in the Middle Ages the protective wall did not exist, and it was therefore dangerous for the pilgrims to walk around the chapel. He did not explain how the pilgrims were supposed to release their attachments, and each found a personal way to do it. After the nine circles, the pilgrims stood for a while with their backs to the chapel, their eyes closed and their arms opened and raised, having their own personal experiences of elevation. Those who shared their experience with me on the way down said they felt a great sense of expansion and of limitless freedom. Again, pilgrims followed a pattern that, according to Celso’s explanations, derived from Christianity. They were not just performing a new ritual, but remaking an old tradition of penance, and giving it a new meaning. After such an intensive program, including a symbolic death and rebirth, pilgrims slowly made their way back to the Hôtellerie where the cars were ready for

Figure 3.2 The chapel of Saint-Pilon from which Mary Magdalene was supposedly taken to heaven by angels. Photo by Eric Charpentier, with his permission.

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departure. They had an abundant meal at the Italian restaurant of SaintMaximin and spent the following night in the Couvent Royal, a hotel inside the ancient monastery next to the church that contained Magdalene’s relics.

Dana and the Female-Oriented Meaning of Christian Figures Dana’s pilgrims arrived at the Sainte-Baume late in the afternoon in August 2004. On the drive from Saint-Maximin toward the Sainte-Baume, the changing landscape and the woods lining the narrow road winding up to the plateau of Le Plan d’Aups were breathtaking. When the mountain of the Sainte-Baume suddenly emerged behind a curve, the women began to look out for the cave of Mary Magdalene with great excitement. Situated on a spot where the dark green forest meets the white rock of the mountain, the cave is barely visible but one can see the Dominican convent built directly into the rock surrounding its entrance (see figure 1.1). When the pilgrims finally caught sight of the convent they were enthusiastic about the place’s energy. As the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the group settled down in a building that the nuns rented to big organized groups such as school parties or pilgrim groups. Sleeping in rooms of up to twenty beds, the women were to share bathrooms, showers, and a big kitchen. Hanging around the kitchen and talking excitedly about their daily lives, workshops they had attended and the adventures of the day, pilgrims had dinner without a proper place to sit down. Dana’s group had a different rhythm from that of Celso’s. During their trip the women visited only a few places, yet celebrated group ceremonies that required elaborate preparation. Several times a day women gathered to sit in a circle, listen to Dana´s explanations, and share their experiences. As pilgrimage participants these women had now become part of Goddess Wood, which existed before the pilgrimage and would continue afterward. The Italian and Englishspeaking groups, by contrast, did not expect their contact with each other to extend beyond the pilgrimage, although they shared a common interest in Celso’s and Roger’s work. Dana continually referred to the spiritual group of the Goddess Wood, whose committed members already shared beliefs and ritual terms and gestures. These common elements were mostly taught to pilgrims who were new to the Goddess Wood during early group meetings. On this occasion Dana also explained the features that pilgrims had in common: first, that they were female, but also that they were “female warriors living at the edge of society.” Roger and Celso did not work toward the creation of such a permanent group. They saw themselves as group leaders, but did not define themselves explicitly as teachers, shamans, or priests. Dana, in contrast, spoke of herself, Clara and Puri

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as priestesses. The whole mood Dana evoked during the pilgrimage had religious and congregational connotations derived from feminist spirituality or from the Christian tradition. While Celso and Roger preferred to use psychological terms, Dana used terms that were more religious. She also referred to a lineage of masters deriving from the Conchero movement, whereas Celso only sometimes referred to his teachers from the Andean tradition and Roger referred to his formation as a psychologist and therapist. Dana’s more ritualist manner of leading the pilgrimage emerged clearly during the first evening gathering at the Sainte-Baume. That evening, Clara and Dana prepared an altar in the middle of the room. Following the Conchero tradition, Clara unfolded a square cloth on the floor depicting the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe (the patron saint of Mexico). She placed a chalice engraved with a picture of the Catalan “black” Virgin of Montserrat in the middle of the cloth and lit four candles that marked the four edges of the cloth (see figure 5.1). Just beside the cloth, there was an incense pot filled with burning coals and the Mexican aromatic copal. The aromatic smoke filled the room, where the women had formed a circle and were listening attentively to Dana’s explanations and Clara’s commentaries. Although Dana had been revolutionary in Argentina, she freely used objects associated with Catholic rites (rosary, chalice), its songs and prayers (Rosary, Pater Nostrum), its ritual gestures (sign of the cross), and its female figures (the Virgin, Mary Magdalene). Her reinterpretation of these Catholic elements sought to recover their original more female-oriented meanings.14 Dana stated that the Christian tradition had deliberately erased the femaleness of the Holy Spirit, thereby eliminating the importance of the female principle in general and of women in particular. The dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, was also an ancient symbol of the Goddess, and the Greek word for dove was peristara. Dana and Clara had decided to use this term as a sort of greeting and common term inside Goddess Wood, but they had added a final “n” to it, making it peristarán. This combined the word designating the dove and the Holy Spirit with the suffix “-an,” which was a common syllable contained in ancient Goddesses’ names and best represented her power.15 Women were invited to use this word whenever they began or ended their speech in the community circle. Dana always spoke of the women in the group as her sisters (hermanas), and little by little pilgrims new to the Goddess Wood began tapping into the idea of sisterhood and using ritual expressions like peristarán. Dana had photocopied in the Catalan National Library song texts containing litanies in honor of Mary Magdalene. However, she had eliminated some lines about the suffering and repentant Magdalene and added some of her own. During the following days, women were to crochet themselves a ritual girdle from the red thread they had brought with them. They could include some pieces of modeled clay and other elements taken from nature such as pieces of wood or

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stones. Each pilgrim was given a tiny pierced ball representing planet earth that she should attach to the girdle, symbolizing her connection to, and worship of, Mother Earth. Having acquired the basic grammar to make sense of and express their shared ideals and created the ritual objects that worked as external manifestations of their female-oriented perspective, Dana’s women were ready to enter the forest.

Turning the Sainte-Baume into Goddess Wood The following morning, women had a quick, stand-up breakfast in the kitchen and prepared picnic lunches. Even though Dana had asked them to make an effort to be unobtrusive, it was clear that there was little chance of this lively group of brightly dressed Iberian women—talking, singing, and dancing—going unnoticed. At the border of the wood of the Sainte-Baume, they stopped at the place where Celso’s group had gone through the limpia process (see figure 3.3). One of the younger pilgrims pointed out that the sign placed at the entrance asked wanderers to respect the silence of the wood. Dana remarked that women tended to lose a lot of energy through talk, and they should learn to stay silent and save

Figure 3.3 Pilgrims from the Goddess Wood during their break before entering the forest of the Sainte-Baume. Photo by Anna Fedele.

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their energy for more important issues. The group would have a quiet unhurried day, approaching the forest, its energy and its spirits in a feminine way. This meant that they would not follow a strict program or a precise path, but give in to their intuitions and sensations allowing themselves to experience the place without rationalizing what they were doing. The negative stereotype that women tend to talk too much had already emerged when several women expressed worries that an exclusively female group would involve a lot of chatting, causing disorientation and disorganization. Dana evoked and reinforced this stereotype and then went on to explain the importance of quietness in terms of energy. The energy released through speech drained the speaker’s own energy supplies. For this reason, it was important to pay attention and to speak only when necessary, avoiding the waste of energy with small talk. The other common stereotype that Dana evoked with her words, on this and other occasions, was the negative perception of women as disorganized and irrational. She gave these two latter female features a positive spin, speaking about the importance of not following a precise program (flexibility) and the need to give way to sensations and emotions (intuition). The feminine way tended to emerge in opposition to a masculine way, understood as over-intellectualized, rigid, and one-dimensional. On this and other occasions, I was struck by the way Dana and her group described themselves as women, labeling themselves as chatty and irrational. Often Dana and her pilgrims, and pilgrims from other groups as well, tended to accept the naturalization of certain features as innately feminine. Considering certain differences between the sexes as biologically given rather than socially determined they reproduced some of the concepts identified by social scientists as providing the theoretical basis for sexual inequality.16 We will see how this procedure of accepting popular assumptions about femininity and trying to transform or reinterpret rather than deconstruct them was a common strategy for the pilgrims. In clear contrast to her previous assertions about female irrationality, some minutes later Dana gave her pilgrims hard, rational information about Mary Magdalene and the Sainte-Baume. Reading from prepared notes, Dana explained that Mary Magdalene had come to the wood from Marseille and lived there for thirty-three years.17 At that time, she said, Celts lived in the area and Druids used the plants of the wood to make their remedies. Magdalene lived in the cave and had a kind of alchemical laboratory there, where she created healing oils. This was a sacred wood with powerful trees and pilgrims should ask permission when entering it. Then they could ask for healing, wisdom, and beauty and allow themselves to experience the wood without rushing. In contrast with the Italians, the Iberian pilgrims did not purify or cleanse themselves before entering the forest, but they did ask for permission. Both groups entered a sacred wood said to be populated by spirits, full of rocks and

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trees that could heal them. Both groups’ entrance into this sacred space was marked by a ritual procedure. Dana’s pilgrims had participated in a brief limpia process the evening before, passing copal-scented smoke over their bodies. It was not clear from whom the pilgrims were asking permission, whether the wood itself as a being or the community of spirits populating the woods: Whoever it was they asked, the pilgrims felt they had been given permission to enter, and judging from their enthusiastic comments, they immediately felt at home. Ignoring the marked paths, Dana cut straight through the forest, followed by the pilgrims in single file. After a short distance, she stopped and everyone sat down on the ground forming a circle. Dana invited those who were having their period to take off their panties, cover their legs with a piece of cloth and sit down on a mossy surface so as to bleed directly onto the earth, as Native American women used to do. Then she began to tell the group more about Mary Magdalene. They sat or leaned against trees, some crocheting their girdles, some wearing a rosary around their necks. For more than an hour, until it was time to move on, Dana gave further explanations about Mary Magdalene and pilgrims discussed their own view of the saint. On the rocky ascending path, Estrella, the Catalan freelance photographer, discovered a stone with a hole in it and stopped briefly to create a small altar with fruit and leaves, an offering to Mother Earth. Soon afterward Nuria, the youngest pilgrim, a blond Catalan woman aged twenty-four, lay face down on a large rock in the middle of the path, her belly on the rock and her arms outspread (see figure 3.4). Clara prevented other pilgrims from calling her and said that she would find her way up on her own, for she needed to stay alone and to go through her personal healing experience. Arriving at the natural dolmen, the pilgrims gathered around it in admiration. Some of them spontaneously lay down inside of it and others just took a break, sitting down nearby. At about one hundred meters above the dolmen at the side of the path, two trees were growing close together. Standing between them, a hand on each trunk, Clara said that she felt their energy and that this was a good place for single women to make a request for the right partner. The two trees formed a couple and could help pilgrims to find their soulmate if they would say exactly what kind of partner they wanted. A queue formed, not only of single women, but also those who were already in couples. Standing between the trees and facing the other women scattered along the path, the woman placed a hand on each tree and asked aloud to meet the man whose qualities she described. She would then say peristarán and the others would respond with the same word, signaling the end of the request. The women with partners asked for more harmony and more stability in their relationships or for more spiritual learning with their partners. Here and also on later occasions we can see that Dana and Clara did not follow a precise ritual script, but were open to creatively added ritual sequences

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Figure 3.4 Nuria, a Catalan pilgrim, lies on a rock along the Chemin du Canapé in the forest of the Sainte-Baume. Photo by Anna Fedele.

according to the circumstances. The leaders and in some occasions their assistants had the authority to interpret the circumstances and decide to create an ad hoc ritual, whereas single pilgrims (like Nuria) were free to decide about the circumstantial addition of personal rituals as long as these did not interfere with the groups’ activities. In this case Clara used the principle of magical attraction according to which similar attracts similar as the basis for this tree ritual. The two trees forming a couple could help women to attract a partner into their life. If the partner they attracted would be suitable for them depended on their ability to clearly describe the sort of man they wanted, thereby projecting the equivalent kind of energy that would serve as a sort of energetic magnet for the partner. After some time, a group of French people came up the path and looked curiously at this assembly of women, listening to one of their number speaking aloud between the trees, while they crocheted and talked among themselves. Once the group had gone by, Dana began to complain, telling Clara that they had to stop doing this kind of thing. The pilgrims were “too visible,” she said, and this went against their original intention to be as invisible as possible. As

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on other occasions Clara contradicted her, trying to convince her that this kind of exercise was important for the pilgrims. Dana became angry and shortly afterward the woman standing between the two trees suddenly began to cry in the middle of her invocation. Dana and Clara immediately stopped arguing. Clara said that they would continue the exercise in a less visible place further on. She asked the woman crying to forgive her and Dana for their argument and thanked her for having expressed, through her tears, the “crossing of energies that had taken place there.” As with this episode, what was supposed to happen on an energy level was seldom taken for granted and often demonstrated through a manifestation on the physical plane (the woman bursting into tears). At the same time what happened during a ritual was never interpreted as random, but carefully analyzed in order to understand its symbolic meaning. At this point Nuria caught up with the group, and everybody continued along the path. The next time the group paused it was again near a place where Celso’s pilgrims had stopped. Dana’s pilgrims sat down about fifty meters from the rocky passage discovered by Celso. Here, in the shadow of a huge old yew tree, Dana read a brief article about a book by Guido Mina di Sospiro on the power of yew trees and about their age-old memory.18 Surrounded by the forest and the rocks, gathered in a circle, and listening to Dana’s voice, pilgrims said they felt a connection with the ancient priestesses and the covens that gathered secretly in the woods. Maria Antònia’s description of her experience that day offers an insight into the feelings of these women: I remember the ascending to the cave of the Sainte-Baume through the wood as a very marvelous moment, a feeling of incredible contact with nature and my fairytale imagination . . . I felt a connection with nature, of such intimate contact with the trees, the bushes, the rocks and the surroundings. For me, these were such magical surroundings that they transported me into fairy tales and I felt that I was experiencing something in my life that was beyond imagination. I had never had such a chance to stay so close to nature in a similar context at a conscious level. I mean, it was as if I could see the dwarves in the stones, the fairies, without seeing them. It was like contact with the elemental [the spirits of the four elements], it was something! .  .  . most of all while we were climbing up. It was as if there was no difference between me, as a person, and the beings and the plants and everything that surrounded me . . . It was something like entering a story. There, when we hugged the trees, the yew trees. Discovering the yew trees was something! I did not know that yew trees existed. That union with everything at the same time was amazing, incredible. (June 4, 2005)

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This feeling of union, almost of fusion with nature, as described by Antònia recurred in the women’s accounts. None of them seemed to actually see the spirits of nature, the devas that Clara claimed to see, but they sensed their presence and felt their energy when lying on a rock or embracing a tree they felt capable of feeling, speaking, and remembering resonated with these sensations. The authors whose works Celso, Dana, and Roger sometimes read from were like travel companions who emerged to share their knowledge with pilgrims at the appropriate moment, offering a few sentences or paragraphs of guidance, and then disappeared inside the backpack. After the pause under the yew, the pilgrims went on to the cave. They were told to take their time, as the group would spend the rest of the afternoon there. Everyone was to do as she liked, while Dana went back to the wood to look for a cave she had heard about accompanied by another woman of the group. Seeing that some of the women knelt or stood in a certain spot behind the main altar where there was a statue of a kneeling Mary Magdalene doing penance, I asked one of them what we were supposed to do there. She answered: “Go there and kneel, or stand if you prefer, do what you like. Mary Magdalene is there, do not worry.” After staying for a while in the place where Dana’s pilgrims and other visitors communed with Magdalene, I decided to join three women who were sitting in the lower part of the cave in front of another statue of a standing Magdalene holding a cross. Two were from Dana’s group and the other woman later turned out to be American. All three of them sat with their legs slightly opened and the back of their hands resting on their knees, a position normally assumed when meditating. None of them seemed surprised that in a Catholic shrine women who did not know each other were sharing a meditation practice, surrounded by the candles lit by other visitors. After half an hour only a few pilgrims remained inside attending a mass being celebrated, and I went out to join the group. Almost the whole of the courtyard at the entrance was occupied by Dana’s women eating, crocheting and talking about the tarot card each of them had just chosen from a set that had appeared out of one of their backpacks. Dana and Puri had come back from their expedition in the forest, and Puri sat down outside the cave while Dana joined the mass inside. It was getting dark when the mass was over, and the pilgrims made their way down to the Hôtellerie. Dana’s group’s climb to the cave had been more flexible than Celso’s. They had not followed a set program, and Clara had done impromptu healings and rituals. Dana had not imposed prearranged stopping places, according to an abstract spiritual program, but the features of the different sites along the way had inspired Dana or Clara to ask for stops. Unlike Celso, they did not follow their personal energetic map of the place, but rather they created it on the move. Back at the Hôtellerie, pilgrims filled the kitchen with their conversation and cooking. While some talked about old loves, their sex lives, and their ways of

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relating to men, others listened silently as they ate meals prepared with food brought from home. The big house with dorm rooms, common showers, and gathering rooms reminded the pilgrims of school excursions, the first nights spent away from home and secret gatherings with schoolmates. Listening to the pilgrims’ excited comments, I wondered whether they had actually all done the same rituals on that day. It seemed that every pilgrim had had an experience quite different from that of the others; rather than referring to specific ritual sequences, figures, or gestures, pilgrims tended to relate the resultant insights or healing effects to their life experience. It appeared that the significance and efficacy of rituals could not be separated from the pilgrims’ narratives about their lives.

Roger’s Group and the Catholic Landscape of the Forest and Cave After a night at a four-star hotel at the Vieux-Port in Marseille and a good breakfast overlooking the old Harbor, Roger’s group reached the plateau of the SainteBaume by bus. They were dropped off at the beginning of the Chemin des Rois on a chilly October morning. This was the easy way to the cave, a wide gravel path winding up the mountain. Two pilgrims who had trouble walking decided to wait at the coach, and the others put on warm coats and made their way up. At the beginning of the path there were many parked cars, and from there the forest of the Sainte-Baume looked rather domestic, with a wooden fence on both sides of the path (see figure 3.5). This gave Roger’s pilgrims a different perspective from that of the other two groups; they missed the wilder part of the forest with its huge trees and amazing rocks. They saw instead the more civilized and Christianized side of the place and did not climb up to Saint-Pilon chapel. Roger did not speak explicitly of the Sainte-Baume as a sacred space and showed no special attachment to or feeling for the site. He had calculated that pilgrims would need an hour to get there and back and half an hour to visit the cave. Everybody had to be back at the bus within an hour and a half. However, he said that pilgrims should follow their own personal rhythm and not worry about being late because he would wait for everybody. Roger explained briefly that legend had it that Mary Magdalene had lived there for thirty-three years. He then headed off, with most pilgrims soon losing sight of him. Somewhat puzzled by Roger’s approach to a place that the other pilgrimage leaders had described as so sacred and important, I made my way up to the cave once more. It seemed as if these pilgrims were entering a totally different wood from the one the Italian, Iberian, and the other independent travelers pilgrims had experienced. No spirits, no sacred trees or rocks had been mentioned; there was just a gravel path with Christian chapels on its sides depicting different

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Figure 3.5 Roger’s pilgrims enter the forest of the Sainte-Baume by the Chemin des Rois. Photo by Anna Fedele.

moments of Magdalene’s life. In fact, Roger’s pilgrims did not seem particularly impressed by the cave and only some of them lit candles, stayed for a while with closed eyes in front of one of the statues of Magdalene or prayed in silence. Two of them, though, secretly left something in a chosen spot of the cave. Outside the cave and on the way down, several pilgrims criticized the Catholic Church and its treatment of Mary Magdalene as a repentant sinner instead of an important apostle. Many of them had read or heard about Susan Haskins’ 1993 book Mary Magdalene; Myth and Metaphor, in which the art historian denounced the way Christian exegetes had remade the first apostle into a prostitute. Roger considered Haskins’ book as “the Magdalene equivalent of Marina Warner’s book about the Virgin Mary.”19 Most of Roger’s pilgrims maintained that they did not feel Magdalene had ever lived there and that they had not experienced particularly strong feelings in the cave. This reaction was quite different from that of most Italian and Iberian pilgrims and of most of the independent pilgrims I spoke to, who liked the energy of the cave and felt good there. The English-speaking pilgrims were particularly critical of Catholicism’s prohibition of women as priests, and angry about what Christian exegetes had done to Mary Magdalene. Brought up in mainly Protestant environments, they were not used to Catholic imagery with its pathos and tragedy (see figures 3.1 and 3.6). Distracted by the marble statues, they barely mentioned the beauty of the cave. On the way back, Roger’s pilgrims criticized the Catholic atmosphere in the cave. Most of them had not felt comfortable in the middle of all the repentant Magdalenes, crosses, and relics.

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Only a few spoke enthusiastically about their feelings of well being there. Margot and Leonard, for instance, both from Catholic backgrounds, liked the cave. Margot told me that she had not expected there to be a church inside the cave, and that she had been expecting something more wild. She concluded that the Church often appropriated places like this. On hearing the reactions of the other pilgrims, Margot observed: “In the cave it was very interesting; you know it felt like there were layers. You know the layer of the monks who venerate maybe a very different Magdalene, more about the biblical fallen woman, and yes, somewhere there was a really deep ancient energy in the cave as well, and it felt like in a sense she was the cave, you know, the cave itself, the earth. You are the earth itself, you are inside. The mother there” (October 2, 2005). Margot identified with some layers of the cave and not with others. The biblical fallen woman that pertained to the Catholic Church did not speak to her. But there was another, more ancient layer of Mother Earth, where she could feel the connection with Magdalene. This was reminiscent of remarks by some pilgrims traveling independently, who told me that they felt that the presence of the Catholic Church had wiped away the original ancient power of the cave and that Magdalene’s energy was no longer there. In Margot’s terms, it seemed as though certain pilgrims felt able to connect with the more ancient layer, feeling Magdalene’s energy and entering Mother Earth’s body, whereas others felt blocked at the more recent level dominated by Catholic images and ideas. Was it the Catholic background of Italian and Iberian pilgrims that had helped them get beyond the fallen woman layer? Or was it Celso’s and Dana’s explanations about the sacredness of the wood and its ancient inhabitants? It seemed likely that Celso and Dana had helped their pilgrims to look beyond the predominance of Catholic imagery, providing another interpretive paradigm that primed them to experience the cave as a feminine space. The longer stays of Italian and Iberian pilgrims inside the wood, and the rituals they performed there also seemed to have helped them to experience the mountain of the Sainte-Baume on a Pagan rather than a Christian level. In terms of the Sainte-Baume places related to the Celtic tradition, the Christian tradition and Celso’s energetic system, Roger’s group only visited a place related to the Christian tradition. It is not surprising then that when Roger’s pilgrims arrived at the cave, the most obvious layer to them was the Catholic one.

Katrina* and Mary Magdalene’s Enigmatic Smile Visiting the Sainte-Baume Roger’s pilgrims experienced the contrast between the Magdalene they knew from their readings, feelings, and visions—the autonomous and courageous Magdalene described as a female equivalent of Jesus—and

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the mourning, repentant woman, bearing a cross and mortifying her body represented inside the cave. Confused by all the statues, Margot and Katrina, the only two British pilgrims of the group, finally discovered, half hidden, a Magdalene who was smiling. They told me how ironic this seemed to them. For Margot, this Magdalene conformed to the repentant sinner version imposed by Catholicism but also hinted at something more ancient and subversive. Magdalene acted here as a link between Christianity and feminist spirituality, without fully belonging to either. In this sense, she was like the figure of the coyote in Northern Amerindian mythology described by Levi-Strauss.20 Paraphrasing Levi-Strauss, one might say that Magdalene acted as a mediating figure that allowed the passage from duality to unity, while at the same time retaining something of the duality that she was meant to surmount. Magdalene allowed pilgrims to connect the apparently opposed ideas and assumptions of Christianity and feminist spirituality, particularly for themes related to the role, the importance and the power of women in the spiritual and social domain. As a mediating figure, she encompassed aspects of both religious systems and hence was permanently ambiguous.21 Katrina, the other British pilgrim who also noticed Magdalene’s secret smile, likewise spoke of a present layer and a past layer, the Magdalene that was and the Magdalene that is now. A retired high-school teacher in her early fifties, Katrina began to have spiritual experiences during her husband’s illness and had begun working as a healer after his death. When I asked her if she had any particular experience in the cave of the Sainte-Baume, she answered: No, and I think that’s because I didn’t expect to have an experience . . . I really felt that it was the Magdalene that was, not the Magdalene that is now. It was very much about how she was perceived as the mourning woman, the repentant harlot, which of course we know she actually wasn’t. The Catholic Church for centuries was observant of Pope Gregory’s belief that would equate Mary Magdalene to the repentant harlot, and it was only in the 1960s the Catholic Church declared that this was not true. But the imagery in the cave for me was about the stuff that had been believed about her. Which we know today that she is not. That she is much more than what that cave said. I went down [down the stairs to the lower part of the cave] thinking that maybe there might be some sense there of the primal sense, you know, the earthy energy, the cave energy, the womb energy, so I went down to the lower part and there I saw this image of the Magdalene in this sort of grief and she is holding this crucifix. So for me it just didn’t feel right. For me there was humor22 . . . these slippery steps, they were very wet, and I was thinking: “Oh my God, here is the female, the water, and its dangerous, this is the dangerous female!” I just felt for me it was

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such a joke, but a spiritual joke .  .  . and there was a very interesting statue of Mary [Magdalene]. For me, it was almost as if she had a slight smile on her face. It did speak to me. (October 2, 2005) Both Katrina and Margot observed that there was a level where Magdalene was being represented as a sinner. This level was evident in the statues showing her in a mourning, penitent attitude, describing her repentant life inside the cave. But whereas Margot felt Magdalene’s presence there, Katrina did not: In terms of where my reading is at the moment, you know, I feel this is legendary, it’s legendary because of the things Susan Haskins has written about, but that doesn’t invalidate that for people who are within the mainstream Catholic tradition . . . this is an important focus because of their own beliefs. I do not think she [Magdalene] lived there, but she can be venerated there by traditional Catholics and I am sure that there are people within the mainstream Catholic system who have very vivid experiences in that place. But obviously I am in a different place and it doesn’t resonate for me. (October 2, 2005) Many pilgrims felt that somehow women’s freedom and power had been undermined by the Catholic altars and statues in the cave. English-speaking pilgrims saw them celebrating a defamed Magdalene, her reality distorted, made over as a sinner by Catholic exegetes. This Magdalene was represented by an almost life-size statue of long-lasting marble, which to them had been put there to keep the image of the Catholic repentant sinner alive, even after the twentieth-century Catholic Church had finally and officially declared her innocence.

The Gregorian Magdalene, Neither With nor Without As we have seen, most of the pilgrims felt that the Church had manipulated the figure of Mary Magdalene over the centuries, turning her into the image of a repentant sinner. They also felt that the Church had appropriated many places of power in Europe. Through their pilgrimages, they were asserting their right to access the energy stored in sacred places, without necessarily believing in or adhering to the Catholic rituals performed there. They also affirmed, through their theories and attitude, that Magdalene should be restored to her true importance and meaning. Paradoxically, in order to reclaim their power places and their Mary Magdalene, they needed to use Catholic churches and

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theories about Magdalene created by the Church’s fathers. There was a continuous tension between their Christian background (and the misogynist and disempowering elements they felt to be inherent in this background) and their own spiritual practices. This was particularly acute among European pilgrims who had been brought up Catholics. As we saw in the introduction, from the 1980s onward a body of theories emerged as part of a contemporary mythology based on Christian figures and symbols. The route of Mary Magdalene linked the places related to the main themes of this mythology, and Roger spelled this out clearly when he said to his pilgrims at the beginning of the tour: “We will see in the places we visit many mythological layers, pre-Christian, ancient Christian, medieval, twentiethcentury Christian, thanks to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln.” But as diverse and contradictory as these Magdalene ‘characters’ might appear on the surface, they had some common traits: problematic relationships between sexuality, femininity, and the Christian religion. At the Sainte-Baume, Celso explained to his pilgrims that Jacobus de Voragine’s version related an account of the arrival of the three Marys to France and of Magdalene’s life and death at the Sainte-Baume. Gregory the Great had confused Mary Magdalene with other female figures, in this way ascribing the image of the repentant sinner to the wrong person. Celso described the Gnostic Magdalene as the disciple that Christ loved most, and concluded that according to the New Age, Magdalene was actually the wife of Christ. Celso added that even if it was not clear whether or not Mary Magdalene was the historical figure of the Bible and whether she had really anointed Jesus with spikenard oil or washed his feet and dried them with her hair, the symbols and acts associated with this figure were important. This was why, the night before, he had invited the pilgrims to wash and anoint each other’s feet. Both Celso and Dana criticized Pope Gregory’s theories about Magdalene, but nevertheless they kept referring to the traits and acts of the Gregorian Magdalene: the spikenard oil, the anointment, and the long hair. Dana even used the anointing attributed to Magdalene by Pope Gregory to demonstrate Magdalene’s importance in the life of Jesus. Accepting the Gregorian conflation of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the nameless sinner in Luke 7:37–38, Dana presented her as the woman who anointed Jesus and then broke the jar containing the precious spikenard oil. This anointment was in her terms an initiation by Magdalene as the priestess of the Goddess of Jesus, who thereafter became the Christ, which means “the anointed one.” In Dana’s terms, by anointing his feet Magdalene prepared them for the via crucis by opening their chakras (centers of energy). Then, by anointing his head,23 she crowned him king before he entered Jerusalem. According to Dana, Magdalene had probably been initiated into the ancient cult of the Goddess and become Her priestess. She stated that Magdalene

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wore her hair long and uncovered, thereby showing that she was a priestess of sacred love and sexuality. The Jewish religious leadership persecuted the followers of the religion of the Goddess, whom they calumniated as the whore of Babylon. It was inconceivable for the Jews of those times that a woman like Magdalene, a prostitute, could touch Jesus in such an intimate way in public, kissing his feet and drying them with her hair. The fact that Magdalene attended the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus demonstrated in Dana’s terms that she had a special relationship with Jesus and that he had given certain teachings only to her. Celso and Dana emphasized how the Christian Church had always tried to confine Magdalene to a minor role, ignoring her position as first apostle so that she did not seem to compete with Peter, the founder of the Church of Rome, or with the Virgin Mary. But the elements both leaders used to evoke Magdalene or to demonstrate her significance and power were inevitably linked to the very Gregorian myths and Christian texts they were criticizing. The pre-Gregorian Magdalene had no personal features one could refer to; she had no long hair, no sensual attitudes and, significantly, no physical contact with Jesus was described in any detail. The Magdalene described in the canonical gospels was cured by Jesus, followed him, witnessed his resurrection and announced his message to the apostles, but she had no age, no face, and no body. According to the Gnostic gospels, Jesus loved Magdalene more than the other disciples and used to kiss her on the lips, but again there was no description of her physical appearance. All personal details about Magdalene that could help to identify her as the expression of the archetype of the lover, derived from the Gregorian composite saint.24 If Celso and Dana wanted to use this sensual lover archetype to foster the pilgrims’ healing process, they had no choice but to refer to the Gregorian Magdalene. The figure of the repentant Magdalene, Celso explained, helped to maintain and consolidate some of the basic tenets of Christianity: Salvation could be attained only through the Church, and women were spiritually inferior to men. If the repentant Magdalene represented the Church’s basic tenets, the Magdalene the pilgrims saw as Jesus’s companion and priestess combined some of the main tenets of alternative spirituality: the spiritual equality of men and women and the direct contact between the human being and the Divine without the need for intermediaries. In the pilgrims’ world made of energy, where the divine force manifested itself in and through the material world, people could gain direct access to the immanent divine force for they were part of it. As a symbol of spiritual equality among men and women and the possibility of a “spiritually attained knowledge,”25 Magdalene also represented the possibility (especially for female pilgrims) of attaining spiritual elevation without renouncing the body, and, in fact, attaining it through the body by practicing sacred sexuality.

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Reclaiming Their Own Mary Magdalene Speaking about the life of Jesus and his disciples, Dana invited the pilgrims to practice what she called a “theology of suspicion” that challenged the misogyny of previous interpretations. Mary Magdalene, the places related to her, and her teachings were presented as an opportunity for pilgrims to establish a new way of seeing and relating to their bodies and the surrounding world. Around Easter 2004, a few months before the pilgrimage, Dana had sent the Goddess Wood’s members a written text about Mary Magdalene. In it, after dismissing all the theories formulated in a New Age atmosphere that try to put a man at Magdalene’s side, Dana wrote: “There is no historical or legendary information about her; there only exists the patriarchal intention to ‘steal from us’ the only archetype of the Lover that has survived in the Christian tradition (and I speak about tradition, not about religion). Behind a reinterpretation that is apparently liberating, they perpetuate the patriarchal idea that a woman is only important as the wife of an important man or as the mother of his children, and they deny Magdalene her own identity.” Referring to the many spiritual-esoteric writings that mention secret treasures and group together Cathars, Templars, Gnostics, and Essenes, she concluded: “These are texts whose departure point is Magdalene and (yet) in which we find that she is the one they least speak about.” Dana gave her own description of Magdalene: “There is a hidden treasure inside Magdalene, a treasure that is to be decoded in these times, but it is not, in my opinion, the treasure that many books point to. She is the privileged incarnation of Sophia, free Woman, Sacred Prostitute of the Ancient Temple of the Goddess, Tantric Partner of Jesus Christ, Apostle of Apostles, Receptacle of Divine Love, Carrier of the Grail, Female Hermit in her cave, living for 33 years on light alone, She who, before us, followed the paths of Ascension.” Like Celso, Dana related the theories about Magdalene as the wife of Jesus and mother of his children to the New Age and spoke about Magdalene as the incarnation of the Gnostic Sophia and as sacred prostitute who knew the secrets of sacred sexuality. Dana’s text also laid out her reading of the archetype of the Lover and its relationship with Magdalene. [Magdalene is like] the dancer who expresses through, her dance, the ever-changing flow of energy in movement; each aspect of her being is a petal of the flower of the Goddess, unfolding itself in its aspect of the Lover. The Lover is, by definition, “she who loves,” but she is also “the other” and therefore she stays in the shadow. Together with the Maid (Virgin), the Mother and the Crone, this fourth archetype of the feminine is the only one that, like the dark moon, must remain hidden, because its function is always initiatory (and therefore secret), both for

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the woman that experiences it and for the man who joins with her in the resulting transgressive partnership. This couple is . . . transgressive . . . because it does not [aim to] unite to create structures that perpetuate the existing order, but . . . to access infinity. In this way, the energy of the Lover allows a woman to love a man impersonally, through her body, without expecting anything from him. Through her example, Magdalene could teach women to experience the archetype26 of the Lover in their own lives: When a woman incarnates in her cells the essence of the Goddess as Lover, she realizes that this energy flows through (her), not to obtain something in exchange (husband, children, security, stability . . .) but to anoint the earth with (her) beauty, so that everybody may be healed through this impersonal love that includes and integrates heart, sex and consciousness. In order to make us capable of this offering, the Lover teaches us women to love our own female bodies deeply, not to feel ashamed of our energy or to deny our enormous capacity for sensuality, tenderness and love, but She also teaches us to incarnate non-attachment inside us and to learn to live in the present. There is no place here for shame, fear nor for expectations. For Dana, Magdalene represented the sacredness of the female body, of a salvation-sexuality that allowed Jesus to fulfill his mission and save humanity. The ultimate sacrifice of Jesus through his passion and crucifixion, interpreted in Christian terms as reversing the fall of humanity, was no longer accomplished by Jesus alone. Just as the first sin was committed by a couple, Adam and Eve, so the salvation of humanity was achieved by another couple. Where Eve led Adam to temptation, Magdalene helped Jesus to bring salvation. Women no longer had to see themselves as sinful daughters of Eve, or to feel guilty and ashamed about their bodies and their sexuality, or to have sex only in order to procreate inside marriage. They could feel and behave as daughters of Mary Magdalene and feel proud of their bodies and sexuality. If Celso did not appear particularly convinced by the New Age idea of Magdalene as wife and mother, Dana openly dismissed it as patriarchal and “only apparently liberating.” Cristina, a childless Catalan dermatologist in her late fifties, observed that contemporary authors representing Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus were depriving childless women of an important reference figure. “They are stealing our archetype!” she exclaimed, denouncing the transformation of Magdalene from lover to wife and mother.27 The Iberian and also the other pilgrims thought that the Church had appropriated not only their Mary Magdalene but also the places

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of power where it was possible to connect with her energy and healing forces in general.

“They Have Stolen Our Sacred Places!” Estrella, the Catalan freelance photographer who dressed like a Roma woman and felt rejected by her conservative Catholic family because of her unconventional lifestyle, told me about her experience at the Sainte-Baume. Speaking in her sincere and spontaneous way, she said: “You enter the cave, and the first thing you see there is the Christ. Mary Magdalene is at the bottom of the cave, in the dark, there at the bottom” (see figure 3.6). For her, the cave was a sacred place to venerate the Feminine and Mother Earth. She said: “I got very angry there, the female space was being violated in its energy!” This Catalan from a conservative Catholic family felt “an anger that came from the guts, not from the head, above all during the mass in the cave.” Estrella’s comments about the Church appropriating the cave of the SainteBaume were similar to those of Margot and others. They offer another example of some female pilgrims’ feelings about the intrusion of the Church into places they felt to be particularly related to feminine energy and the Goddess, the power places where different civilizations had supposedly constructed their temples or celebrated their rituals were now the exclusive domain of the Church.

Figure 3.6 The interior of the cave of the Sainte-Baume. In the front the main altar, on the left, the altar where the Holy Sacrament is conserved. Photo by Eric Charpentier, with his permission.

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While Dana’s pilgrims were visiting the cave, a group of French Catholic pilgrims were attending a mass celebrated by the priest who accompanied them. Some of the Iberian pilgrims, including Dana and Clara, stayed to participate. When they came out of the cave, Clara enthusiastically described the priest’s ritualistic precision. Estrella commented that “I saw that the guy was moving the energy in an impeccable way, but I did not like the goal he had in doing this. And I saw all the bosses [meaning Clara and Dana] sitting there in the first row and thought: We have to get out, to rebel! We have been sitting for centuries there on the front bench! This hurts our matrix! [daña a nuestra matriz]” (September 18, 2005).28 Estrella described the emotional response she felt in her body, particularly the lower part of her body, the guts, and the womb. She seemed to perceive the cave in a clearly physical way, referring to it as the womb of Mother Earth that was being violated in its energy. We have already seen that the pilgrims associated caves with Mother Earth, symbolizing the female vagina and uterus with their humidity and their darkness. According to Estrella, the male priests not only violated this sacred female space, but by doing so they also hurt the womb of every woman. She felt that these men, who represented the Church, were still doing to women psychically what they had done to them physically throughout the centuries, declaring their sexuality impure and dangerous, burning them as witches and characterizing Magdalene as a prostitute and sinner. Estrella perceived this as gender-specific violence to her body and particularly in the part of the body that is female par excellence, the uterus. Here again the body emerges as a privileged locus to perceive the efficacy of ritualization and its outcomes in terms of energy. In Estrella’s terms the ritual of the mass was effective in the sense that it managed to reassert Church domination of women, their bodies, and their sexuality. If in Catholic terms the ritual reached its goal, in terms of female empowerment, its effects were harmful and in contrast with the healing influence Estrella knew from Dana’s rituals. Upset about the mass, Estrella immediately left the cave. Outside she spoke to Purificación, the doctor of the group, who had chosen not to attend the mass. Estrella wanted to understand why Dana and Clara were sitting there listening to the priest. Puri tried to calm her down, but Estrella insisted, “we have to reclaim this place!” Later she said vehemently: “In the sixties there was the revolution, but it was not a spiritual revolution, it was a social and maybe a sexual revolution. Let us say that it was a revolution that had more to do with the material level. On the spiritual level, there was no feminine revolution” (September 18, 2005). Estrella considered herself to be an exponent of a spiritual revolutionary movement. The term guerreras (female warriors), often used by Dana, reinforced Estrella’s attitude. But in seeing her leaders attend the mass in the cave, Estrella felt let down by them.

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The following summer, Estrella had a similar feeling of disappointment. A year after the pilgrimage of the blood, in the summer of 2005, she returned to the Sainte-Baume with a Brazilian woman who also worked with the Goddess. They attended the annual Catholic procession in Saint-Maximin on July 22nd, when Mary Magdalene’s relics and her skull, encased in gold, were carried through the village. They attended a Catholic ritual that Estrella felt to be wrong. Calling the celebrating priest “the master of ceremony,” Estrella explained: He was ugly, dirty, with fat hair and dandruff, he sang very badly, and this man was singing to Mary Magdalene! I got irritated. It all looked like a program on channel Five [Telecinco].29 Then the tribe of cardinals30 entered, all masked and dressed up like in a horror movie, the hands of the dead, with thin, fleshless fingers. I felt that they were like vampires who had nothing to do with Mary Magdalene. There was an energy as if they were making fun. Mary Magdalene has the energy of Venus, love, delicacy, beauty and this all was in contrast with it. My cells revolted. (September 18, 2005). Again Estrella described her rejection of the clergy in terms of a physical reaction, in this case, revulsion. These men seemed to her like the hideous vampires of horror films, in contrast to the beauty of Mary Magdalene. Estrella then used an expression that is very difficult to translate: se me revolucionaban las células, literally, “my cells started to revolt.” Again the theme of revolution emerged, the need to turn the organization of important sacred places, still dominated by the Church, upside down. When the mass inside the basilica of Saint-Maximin was over, the procession began. Everybody inside the church received a candle that was lit from a central flame. Estrella asked herself if this was the fire of Mary Magdalene and felt that it was not. She began to pray to Magdalene, asking her to send healing to all these men, if it was really Her fire. With a triumphant expression in her face, Estrella told me that when the procession left the church the sky was pink and it was very windy. The wind blew out her candle and, soon after, all the other candles and the torches lining the path of the procession. “I felt that this was not the fire of Mary Magdalene,” she said. Again I saw that I did not want to engage energetically in this procession, because this was not Mary Magdalene. To participate means to give them the power. Anna, it is better if you do not go there, unless you go there to make a revolution!” As opposed to Dana, Clara, and the Brazilian woman in Saint-Maximin, who seemed to feel at ease with Catholic ceremonies, Estrella and some of the other Catalan pilgrims did not. Two other female pilgrims, who had visited the SainteBaume by themselves, said that they felt that the place was no longer what it had once been. Its energy and force had been compromised by the presence of the

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Catholic Church that had ruled it for centuries. Whereas Estrella held that women should fight to reclaim this and other places, such as Chartres for instance, these two women felt that there was nothing left there for them. During the French mass inside the cave, most of Dana’s pilgrims were sitting outside in front of a statue of the Virgin holding the dead body of Jesus in her arms. They were talking, eating, knitting, and interpreting tarot cards. When Dana and the others came out of the mass, everyone began to discuss whether it was right that Dana, Clara, and other pilgrims had attended this Catholic ceremony. Everybody wanted to share her feelings about the officiating priest and the way he behaved. Clara was enthusiastic about the way he moved the energy, which reminded her of some ceremonies of the Concheros. By the evening meeting the debate was still going on, and it became even livelier after Marie-France, a pilgrim of French origin, explained that the group involved in the mass were French Catholic extremists and the ritual preVatican II, with the priest never standing with his back to the altar. Clara tried to convince the women that they should have attended the mass, transcended dogma, and taken advantage of the fact that this priest was celebrating the mass in the old way, using movements and gestures that had disappeared from the current ritual. “Following the ritual is like taking a coach,” she told them. “You are sure that all those traveling inside it will get to where they want to. If you go on your own and in your own way you cannot know if you will ever arrive.” Clara said that fortunately she did not know that those attending were extremists, and had therefore been able to enjoy the perfection of the ritual. It seemed that in this instance too, there was a barrier to be overcome in order to benefit from something (a place, a ritual) that pertained to Catholicism, but whose power could be appreciated by pilgrims in terms of energy. Latin-Americans like Dana or the Brazilian pilgrim described by Estrella, and people like Clara and Celso who had received a spiritual formation in Mexico and Peru, seemed to cross this boundary easily. Dana explained her relationship with the Catholic Church and the way the Christian Goddess managed to reunite Christian and Neopagan ideals by saying that in Latin America Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, were not perceived in the same way as in Europe. For centuries, people had been used to the mixture of indigenous beliefs and dominant Catholicism. For this reason, Dana did not feel that there was a contradiction between the original message that was at the base of Christianity and the worship of the Goddess. In fact, some of Celso’s pilgrims told me that after traveling to Peru they had begun to see Catholicism and its related images in a different way. Discovering and observing (through Celso’s explanations) the syncretic use made of figures like the Virgin or the Christ around Cuzco had allowed them to experience statues, churches, and masses more freely. Similar comments were made by

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those of Dana’s pilgrims who had attended Conchero ceremonies at a chapel at Montserrat.31 Encarna and Maria Rosa, the two independent pilgrims, had enjoyed the Catholic ceremonies at the Sainte-Baume as well. Their visit had by chance coincided with the Pentecost procession of Magdalene’s relics, in which the Dominicans of the cave convent brought the relics from Saint-Maximin to the Hôtellerie (aproximately 25 kilometers) and then to the cave. The procession from the Hôtellerie to the cave started at sunset, and both Encarna and Maria Rosa described this experience of walking among French Catholic pilgrims, each bearing a candle, as a beautiful ritual that reminded them of pilgrimages in ancient times. Unlike Estrella in the evening procession in Saint-Maximin on July 22, these women felt that their candles really did carry the energy of Mary Magdalene. Both Encarna and Maria Rosa had been influenced by spiritual teachers from Latin America and, like Clara, they perceived this and other Catholic rituals as a pathway toward an end.

Bypassing Christian Layers As we have seen, Leonard and Margot, the two pilgrims from Roger’s group with a strong Catholic background, liked the cave of the Sainte-Baume. Leonard, a charismatic man in his late fifties with shining blue eyes and grey hair who had once been a Liberal Catholic priest,32 described his intense experience: I think the most powerful point for me so far has been in the cave of Magdalene where we climbed up the hill and then arrived to the cave and there was just something there that signified to me that integration between the light and the darkness. In the cave there was something underground yet there was still this sensation of the light, the heart opening. It seems as if that place just brought it together for me. And I realized too that the Magdalene had such enormous courage, because she seemed to be able to be true to herself and to express her own view of things and to not give in to all the men that were around her, not to be led astray by their view of things. And as I was reading the gospel of Mary Magdalene33 just how she was able to stand her ground when some of the other disciples were questioning if she had imagined her experience, whether she was lying to them. And that she was just able to stand in her own truth and her own strength. That’s just a wonderful attribute, which I think is part of what the feminine is. It’s that underground strength that’s the true strength as opposed to the male strength, the masculine strength that’s more on the surface and

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more—putting on the show, appearing to be brave; but underneath, the feminine is where the real strength is. (October 5, 2005) Magdalene appeared to Leonard as a woman able to integrate the light and the dark, the male and the female, and to manifest an “underground strength.”34 The false stories about Magdalene were, in his words, “male stories,” in contrast to another layer that was more ancient and had clearly female connotations. In Leonard’s account, we can see again how the pilgrims’ spiritual experiences and readings are indissolubly intertwined. In contrast to Roger’s pilgrims, the Iberian and Italian pilgrims were so used to the presence of the Catholic layer they were scarcely aware of it. They barely noticed the statues of Magdalene, and focused on their own energy practices inside the cave. Helped by Celso’s and Dana’s hints at a deeper meaning to these places and a more ancient use of the healing energy they felt to be present there, they managed to tune straight in to the pagan level of the cave, feeling a sense of fusion with Mother Earth and a connection with Magdalene’s energy. In the poem Margot wrote after visiting the Sainte-Baume and Saint-Maximin, she expressed her own mixed feelings, using images that echoed Estrella’s words. Une Question Je pose une question à la Madeleine, What do you make of all these men? These monks in their white robes who choose to worship you to keep your vigil in a mountain cave who renounce the body and the love of women. Men who view you as a fallen woman who has repented and been saved. Je pose une question à la Madeleine, What do you make of all these men? who took your head into their hands and covered it in gold who encased your skull in glass, inside a cask behind a metal grill. What do you make of all these men? who have used the love of Madeleine as an excuse to rape and loot and kill.35 Antònia described the difficulty she had in contacting the more ancient layer, which she defined as “the profoundity of what had been”:

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And when we arrived at the cave I felt rejection, I mean, I do not know what was there, nor what happened. It was as if the energy that I found in the cave did not please me at all. It was hard for me to enter and pass through this barrier that did not exist, but that existed for me, a barrier of something unpleasant . . . It was hard to get through this barrier and to be able to really perceive the profundity of what had been. Because that was what made it difficult for me to see what had been there. I did not feel comfortable inside the church . . . I only began to feel comfortable when we went behind the altar. There was a humid hole there [the spring] and there I could finally begin to connect . . . I felt something that was more internal, like a different vibration. But as a whole it was difficult for me . . . I was distracted by images that came to my mind more related to tourism, like at Lourdes or Fatima, you know, I have been to these places. And so I felt more the religious thing [rollo religioso] than the spiritual thing. (June 4, 2005) The distinction between religious and spiritual made by Antònia emerged from the accounts of many pilgrims from different groups. The adjective “religious” and its corresponding substantive “religion” were used with a negative connotation to express attitudes along the lines of rigid, commonplace, and rational. For the pilgrims, they represented a belief structure identified as oldfashioned, cold, and disjointed from issues of everyday life, especially sexuality. On the other hand, the adjective “spiritual” and the substantive “spirituality” expressed all that was missing from religion.36 Spirituality allowed a connection with one’s own spirit, a connection between the individual spirit and the surrounding natural spirits. Through spirituality, one could attain self-fulfillment and through feminist spirituality women could discover their real power and the sacredness of their bodies and their sexuality, whereas established religions denied women’s power in one way or another. Giving as a derivation the Latin religare, meaning to bind together, the pilgrims referred to religion as a constricting, binding system that prevented, rather than fostered, human experience of the divine. In Antònia’s words, the “religious thing” of the Sainte-Baume prevented access to the spiritual dimension of the cave. They similarly considered Marian shrines like Lourdes and Fatima to be expressions of the religious, not the spiritual. The Magdalene pilgrims considered them places of power where the Sacred Feminine had manifested itself to visionaries, but had been wrongly identified by them as the Virgin because of their Catholic backgrounds. The structures and physical buildings arranged by the Catholic church in these places rendered access to their healing power more difficult, because first one had to get through the Catholic layer. If, however, Catholic pilgrims were able to feel or contact that power, they would be likely to attribute the sense of well being they might experience there to the Virgin.

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The mountain of the Sainte-Baume was an arena where pilgrims could use the elements of the landscape to experience a meta-empirical dimension or to receive healing. They felt that Catholics had manipulated the energy of the place in the same way as they had distorted the figure of Mary Magdalene, describing this priestess of the Goddess and companion of Jesus as a sinner and prostitute. The pilgrims struggled to bypass the barrier posed by the Catholic layer and to recover their sacred places and their own Mary Magdalene.

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Pilgrims Dealing with Their Christian Backgrounds

When commenting on their experiences during the trip, particularly their feelings inside Catholic churches, many pilgrims referred to their past. They had been raised inside various Christian churches (Catholic, Anglican, Protestant) that they later came to criticize or reject outright. Some of them also referred to past lives and highlighted the continuity between their past and present lives. In all their narratives, a complex and often ambivalent attitude toward Christian rituals, symbols, and dogmas emerged. In this chapter we will explore in more detail the biographies of the three leaders and of certain pilgrims, focusing on their negative experiences with the clergy. We will see how the way these persons conceptualized the pilgrimage experience was intimately related with their sense of attraction and repulsion toward Christianity and their desire to find an autonomous access to the healing power of Christian figures like Mary Magdalene. As we have seen, the pilgrims’ ideas about spirituality and their modalities of experiencing it were deeply informed by their experiences within Christian, mostly Catholic religion. Even if in their discourse Christian religion was almost symmetrically opposed to true spirituality, close examination reveals continuity and ongoing negotiation rather than rupture with their Christian backgrounds. In the passage from one dimension to another hybrid figures like Mary Magdalene or Black Madonnas (seen as belonging to both the Christian/religious and the spiritual) played key roles. Celso, talking about his relationship with Catholicism, mentioned an object that exemplified his alternating attraction toward and rejection of the Christian and, particularly, the Catholic: “When I attended high school [in the 1960s] they distributed the gospel in a cheap edition and it had a red cover with an image of Jesus on the top. At the same time, I had also bought the red booklet, the book of the red guards of Mao Tse Tung, and I had taped them together, both were red. And when it was time for the religion lesson at high school, I arrived, sat in the first row and put this [book] right in front of the priest. It was a provocation” (February 16, 2006). 123

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Celso’s red book united the Christian ideals of his childhood with the Communist ideals he learned about during his teens. Celso already knew the Gospels well and felt attracted to the message of Jesus but antagonistic toward everything and everyone who represented organized religion. This tension even manifested itself in his name. My name, Celso . . . I was not meant to be called Celso, I was supposed to be called Stefano, after a monk with whom my parents had a very good relationship. Then the friendship ended and so they remembered a doctor called Celso who was well known in our village, and they decided to give me that name .  .  . They did not know that in Roman times there had been a Celso who was a doctor and philosopher and they did not know that he had written against the Christians . . . So there is a continuity in this that also manifests itself in my relationship with Catholicism, a relationship that has always been very critical and, at the same time, I always felt very interested in it and wanted to know more about it. (February 16, 2006) Born just after his parents had quarreled with a monk with whom they had had a special relationship, Celso would begin and continue quarreling with members of the Catholic church in his younger years. After his confirmation, Celso continued to attend the parish church until the incumbent priest literally kicked him out for attending mass with the Communist newspaper L’Unitá under his arm. Celso observed: “Mine was a reaction, a need to express my identity toward my family, an identity constructed in opposition, in rebellion.” Born in 1956, two years after Dana, Celso spent his late teens and early twenties deeply involved in the Communist movements of his country. Like many who were adolescents in the sixties, he and Dana saw themselves as rebels. However the different political situation in Argentina led Dana to live out this rebellion more literally, and she joined the revolutionary army. Both Dana and Celso finally made peace with Catholic rituals, places, and figures, thanks to the syncretic approach they experienced in Latin America and their more or less formal training in psychology. All three leaders had backgrounds in psychology, especially Jungian psychology,1 and had been raised either by Catholic parents (Celso and Roger) or in a Catholic culture (Dana). They had all learned to retain Christian values, rituals, and places and to interpret Jesus’s teachings in accordance with their own ideological and political values. Before fleeing Argentina, Dana discovered that her father, a life-long agnostic, had made a pilgrimage to the patron saint of Argentina, the Virgin of Lujan. He put Dana, his only daughter, under the protection of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. Shocked by what her father had done, Dana went

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to thank the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception shortly after her safe arrival in Barcelona. During the years that followed, she developed her own kind of devotion to the Virgin, inspired by her father’s affirmation: “I do not believe in God, but I believe in the Virgin.” As for Celso, while in his forties he met the anthropologist Juan Nuñez del Prado, who taught him to consider the figures of the Virgin and the Christ as manifestations of divine feminine and divine masculine energy.

Churches Are Like Signposts Roger’s way of relating to churches and organizing journeys of sacred exploration roughly coincided with those that Dana and Celso offered to their pilgrims. But Roger was the most explicit of the three group leaders about how to reinterpret Christian figures and shrines and how to self-analyze religious trauma. Roger’s mother, who was Catholic, had been abandoned by her husband when Roger was a child. After the divorce, she no longer wanted to be part of a religious system that saw her as a fallen woman: Even though my mother hated the Catholic Church, she still encouraged me to try and find something in the Anglican Church. She could have said, keep away from them, they’re all rotten .  .  . School was a strong influence because it was a very traditional, old-fashioned English school and they had a very strong choir so I learnt all this music. [Later] I read books about Christianity. I tried to understand it. I tried hard to be a good Christian at one time, and it was totally empty, totally, nothing going. So to discover France and the Middle Ages, that was important because it was different and it was fresh. And no one was forcing me to do it. It was as if I was an archeologist. I was discovering a dead religion. Medieval Christianity is dead. It just got the songs and the music and some of the troubadour legends. (November 6, 2006) To overcome the tension between his attraction toward places of power related to Christian churches and his rejection of certain basic principles of Christian doctrine, Roger had developed his own particular approach. Seeing himself as an archeologist visiting ancient temples related to past civilizations and religions, Roger could pick out what he found interesting about medieval churches and dismiss the rest. During his journeys through France, Roger had visited the places he felt attracted to and which might help him recover memories from past lives. But how did he choose the places for his tours and why did he think that some places might be more important than others to visit?

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Well, it usually started with my wandering around in those areas by myself or in a car or following my nose, usually with the Michelin [guide] and if it recommended somewhere I would go over there and look at it. And if I liked it, if I felt drawn to it, I would keep it in, so I started blind a lot of the time . . . The rest was really a slow discovery of medieval France, and the main guidebook I used was Ean Begg, the Black Madonnas [1985], as he tried to go everywhere . . . He is a Jungian, so I respect his scholarship and what he put together. I don’t accept his theories. What I liked about it was that . . . he almost always found that there was a cult: a Roman cult, a Celtic cult, long before the Christians . . . Christianity is relatively recent in Europe and these places had been taken .  .  . Roman cults, Greek cults had been spreading all over Europe for a long, long time. But Christianity later covered all of them up, christianized the saints or changed the legends to assert themselves . . . And I think Begg is very useful because, as a Jungian, he is just interested in anything religious, anything that produces archetypal experiences, that has a myth attached to it. (November 6, 2006) In Roger’s terms, it was important to know whether in locations where there was now a Christian Church there had once been temples or sacred places from previous civilizations. If so, this confirmed the special power of the place, but it was not essential to have exact details or definitive historical proof. “So you don’t have to know, there doesn’t have to be a definitive explanation for this Madonna or why [the Madonna of] Chartres was underground or whether there were druids there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter in the end, because the place is still alive and you get experiences when you go there . . . So I just felt to trust, go to any of them and see what I’d find. And it’s clear that in many of them there are layers and layers of what might have been” (November 6, 2006). Roger also spoke of layers belonging to different periods, civilizations and religions, all pointing to the fact that a particular place was innately powerful.2 The important thing was to get through all the layers and reach the core energy of the place. Describing in more detail the slow formation of the many possible layers of a sacred place, Roger mentioned the example of the church in Le-Puyen-Velay, one of the places of the Magdalene tour. This cathedral in the Auvergne is a famous shrine holding a Black Madonna, Notre-Dame du Puy. The town is also an important point on the French path to Santiago. Roger described how the different layers could be recognized and how they had probably come into existence: Le Puy is a good example. You remember in the cathedral that extraordinary “pierre de fievres” [fever stone], this black stone, what the hell is that? It was obviously there before they built the cathedral .  .  . The

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cathedral is built on the side of one of these pinnacles . . . these volcanic places, which must have been a place of power. And it’s a healing stone and they call it the fever stone. It was almost certainly Celtic, very ancient, and that probably was an old druid shrine . . . long before the Christians came. And so the Christians came. The local people, they were using this stone because it worked, they got healing from it, so they [the Christians] had to sort of build it in the cathedral somehow . . . So they know it’s a power place, they’ve got to have a cathedral there. And at some point, someone turns up from the crusades with a statue of the mother, which is probably an Isis, maybe an Isis. Of course, this belongs in the cathedral. It’s part of it. So another layer is added to the experience of the place. It’s all about the place. (November 6, 2006) Roger’s approach to Ean Begg’s theories offers a good example of all three pilgrimage leaders’ selective use of the spiritual esoteric literature about Mary Magdalene. Dana would say, “If there’s smoke, there’s fire.” If authors like Begg identified certain places, these places were likely to have power even if the explanations for the power were not accurate. For Roger the churches were not the crucial thing. Most of the time they were like signposts, signaling that there was a powerful place in that spot or in the surrounding area. Places with Black Madonna shrines were particularly effective signposts: “It’s a signpost, and we have forgotten that it’s about the places, we have lost touch with the geography of the earth, the sacred geography,” he said. “So I think that’s what happens, the best places are kind of moving [changing] and they just build another layer. Deeper and deeper. So when I go to churches in England, France or Germany, I just follow my natural intuition, to go to where the focal point is” (November 6, 2006). According to Roger, most visitors ignored the principles of sacred geography. They thought that the church itself, built on a certain spot, was the significant thing. If the physical location of the church happened to coincide exactly with the focal point or points of the site’s power, visitors could profit from its energy, but if this was not the case, they were looking for healing in the wrong place. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a Christian shrine had been moved, or rebuilt, somewhere away from the original location. For Roger, the shrine then lost its power and became just a hollow container: The patron saint of Brazil is a Black Madonna, Nossa Senhora Aparecida [Our Lady of Aparecida]. She is a Black Madonna without a baby and she was found in a river, it was said . . . So this little town of Aparecida is one of those with the classic rivers snaking around. And the river goes round a hill top . . . And they built a little village on the top . . . Right at the center [of the summit], probably corresponding to the

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crossing of yin and yang energies, they built the church . . . and they put the Black Madonna in it .  .  . By modern times it had become a huge chapel, it’s like Fatima .  .  . But it’s not in the town any longer, they moved it away from the little town, they put it where they can build the car park for thousands of people. So I went to see the Madonna, in the big basilica and I got nothing. You know, it’s just a nice Madonna up there on a very high altar, a huge, bloody concrete church. (November 6, 2006) From what Roger said it appeared that the original power places were those where important energy lines met; they could be recognized by certain topographical characteristics. Through sacred geography, it was possible to identify the original site, to retrace the steps back to it and to find the energy there: So I said to my friend who took me there, “Let’s go outside, let’s go and see what the old town looks like.” So we found the church in the little town upon the hill, river flowing around it, where the Madonna used to live, and that’s where you felt the power. And where there’s a combination of a mountain and a river energy, that’s a sacred place. But for the modern world and the tourist parties, they had to move her somewhere else. But the energy was still there, even if the Madonna had moved. (November 6, 2006) All three leaders led their pilgrims to places they had first searched out for themselves. By reading the landscape, and listening to their intuition and their physical sensations, they had located places they perceived as particularly powerful. For both these leaders, powerful spots could also be found where the power of nature manifested itself in a particular way (water sources, underground caves). Apart from sites related to the Magdalene and Black Madonnas, Roger had chosen an underground cave and a spring that had impressed him. He also included some places, like the Roman arenas in Arles and Orange and the archeological museum in Marseille, that could give pilgrims an insight about the different civilizations that had occupied that area and built temples on the sacred sites. Dana focused on places related to the legend of Magdalene, including some spots in Catalonia that after much research she had found to be related to the underground church of Mary Magdalene. Dana never spoke explicitly of sacred geography, but she described the selected sites of the pilgrimage as places of power. While Celso and Dana did not go so far as to describe Christian Churches and Black Madonna shrines as mere signposts, they agreed with Roger about the many layers that needed to be penetrated in order to access the core energy of the places.

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Felicia’s Skeptical Approach Another example of struggle with Christianity was that of Maria Felicia, the eldest of the core members of Goddess Wood, known inside the group for her rationalism, which she attributed to her scientific background as a biologist. Felicia never shared her parents’ religiosity and used her scientific formation as a vehicle to counteract the dogma she had received as a child. Even though she presented herself as skeptical and nonreligious to me, her life showed a constant interest in religious matters. Her selective attitude toward Dana’s explanations offers an extreme example of skepticism born of a fear of recapture by Christianity. This tall, intense Catalan lady in her early fifties wore her white hair short, and right from the beginning her blue eyes looked at me with a mixture of interest and challenge as she answered my Spanish commentaries and questions in her native language. Felicia’s parents were profoundly Catholic and during her childhood she used to fall asleep every evening while they said aloud the five mysteries of the rosary in Catalan and then the litanies in Latin. She trained and worked as a nurse and also graduated with a degree in biology in 1975. As a child she enjoyed participating in the Scouts, which in Catalonia, as in Italy, were a Church organization. She was a Girl Guide and later an official of the organization. During the post-Franco period and the rise of feminism in Catalonia, Felicia managed, with others, to achieve an equal presence of men and women in the Catalan Scouts. According to Felicia, at the time of the pilgrimage this same goal had not yet been achieved in the rest of Spain. Felicia did not like working as a nurse and began to work for a biological laboratory in 1975. In 1999 she began to attend healing sessions because of her frequent headaches, and eventually decided to train as a therapist herself. The same year she started work as a security guard of a historic building outside Barcelona, which she was still doing at the time of pilgrimage. She also occasionally worked as a holistic therapist. During the late 1970s and 1980s she had a group of friends with whom she would celebrate the Eucharist without a priest, consecrating bread and wine and then sharing it. From the 1990s onward Felicia worked at a center for the study of religious traditions in Barcelona and this activity made her further develop her skeptical approach to religion. In 2002, Felicia began to join the Goddess Wood’s gatherings for the new moon celebration in Barcelona. On Candlemas in February 2003 Felicia was initiated as a Daughter of the Goddess Wood, and in February 2004 she received the second initiation as a Guardian. The following summer, she signed up for the pilgrimage. A friend of hers who had introduced her to Dana’s activities had participated in the first pilgrimage and talked enthusiastically about it.

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Felicia’s family only knew bits and pieces about her spiritual life and the rituals she attended. One of her brothers was a part-time teacher of Tai Chi, the other was a supporter of the antiglobalization movement in Catalonia linked to the Forum of Portoalegre, and her sister was a nun. Thanks to Dana’s flexible and creative approach, Felicia had found a less conservative and constricted access to the Christian pantheon. She explained: “I was impressed by Dana’s first text about Mary Magdalene, where she spoke of Magdalene as an archetypal figure, the figure of the lover among the four female archetypes of the virgin, the mother and the crone. Magdalene represented the lover and this touched me deeply. It left me with a question, a desire to know . . . I do not totally believe everything Dana explained but I am interested in all the meanings related to Mary Magdalene” (June 17, 2005). When I asked Felicia if she had discovered other things about Mary Magdalene during the pilgrimage, she answered: Yes, but in this area I feel ambivalent . . . if it is something at a symbolic level and at a level related to images, then I like it; but if things are explained as if they were real, then there are people who believe them and they should not believe them. When this happens, I adopt a defensive position, I reject [it] and I do not believe what I hear. And in some cases, these things are not so important because the things involved are winning ones: the power of the symbol and the image. Because if we speak about beliefs, I am not interested to know anything about Magdalene, nor about anybody else. Because I spent many years letting go of all the beliefs I held when I was young and so now I am not interested in entering through the way of belief: [I do not want] to know exactly what happened, if the boat arrived, if Magdalene went on to live for 40 years somewhere further away from there. If there is a possibility that somebody could live from a force that is not related to eating, that interests me, but I do not care whether this really happened there. Whether the angel came down or didn’t come down, this does not interest me [she laughs]. (June 17, 2005) Felicia had slowly moved away from the Catholic beliefs she had inherited from her parents; she had been the first woman in her family to study at university and live independently. A single woman without children, she had rejected her family’s schema of femininity that allowed for being either a nun like her sister or a wife and mother. Moreover she was the secret, long-term lover of two friends, both of whom were married and neither of whom knew about her relationship with the other. To her, Magdalene as the archetype of the lover was a model and an inspiration. With her practical attitude, she incorporated this aspect of Magdalene as a point of reference for her own life, dismissing all other

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theories about Magdalene’s historical life and deeds. On this respect, Felicia would probably have fitted better into Roger’s group. Dana’s other pilgrims were more interested in Magdalene’s historical life story and her role at Jesus’s side. Felicia was also extremely secretive about her spiritual life, and asked me not only to change her name but also to avoid mentioning the healing technique she used as an alternative therapist. Her combative nature emerged in her life narrative and in her refusal to switch from Catalan to Spanish when she spoke to me, and it came out as well in her approach to Dana’s theories and rituals. This reluctance to accept the leader’s discourse, criticizing and reinterpreting spiritual theories and practices, characterized to a greater or lesser degree the pilgrims from all three groups. As we will see, the transmission of knowledge from leaders to pilgrims was not definitive, but occurred with considerable reinterpretation.

Past Lives in a Catholic Context When talking about their interest and attraction toward Mary Magdalene, pilgrims in Roger’s group, especially, tended to refer to experiences in their past lives. These kind of other lives were also a common feature in Celso’s pilgrims’ accounts of their reasons for joining the trip. Pilgrims also referred to their past lives in order to explain their critical attitude toward Christianity and the special link they felt with heretical movements persecuted by the Church. The theories and practices related to reincarnation and the possibility of recovering memories from previous incarnations of one’s soul (referred to as past lives,) call for more anthropological attention. Michael F. Brown, referring to reincarnation as related to the phenomenon of channeling, observed: The existence of a divine essence within each of us does not mean that we are all fully developed beings. Channels and their clients generally believe that humans undergo successive reincarnations to acquire important learning experiences, an evolutionary process that may include lifetimes in other planetary systems or dimensions .  .  . They seem comfortable with the assumption that there is an irreducible quality of the self that persists, say, through successive incarnations as a Babylonian magician, a Saxon peasant, a Buddhist monk, and a powerful healer from another dimension. Standing beside reincarnation in channeling’s theology is the doctrine that we are responsible for creating our own reality.3 I will refer here mainly to Roger’s approach to past lives and the therapy he has developed in relation to them,4 as these roughly coincide with that of pilgrims acquainted with past life theories and techniques. As with other spiritual issues, so in the case of past lives there existed a wide spectrum of engagement

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among the pilgrims. Some of them simply remained open to the possibility that previous lives might exist, and others were able to tell details about those lives that had been crucial to their spiritual development through life cycles. Even if pilgrims referred to the idea of reincarnation as postulated in Buddhism, their definition differed from the traditional Buddhist one. Roger’s book Other Lives, Other Selves. A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives was originally published in 1987.5 He explained that during most of his therapeutic sessions, he induced his patients to remember and live through what they perceived to be their past lives. He maintained that many mental, psychological, and physical problems of the present could be explained and eventually solved, through discovering how patterns deriving from what the patient experienced as other selves influenced current behavior. Experiencing these other selves during therapy sessions with Roger, the patient supposedly discovered how he or she reenacted sequences of past life stories in the present. One example he gave was of a woman who might discover that she could not have children in the present “because of guilt about abandoning an infant during a famine”6 in what she experienced as a past life. Roger did not use hypnosis in order to have his patients remember past lives, but maintained that through using simple relaxation techniques, past life memories soon began to emerge. Roger invited the patient to allow as much detail as possible to come up and to revive the sometimes traumatic events associated with it. He observed that his clients were not “possessed” by their other selves, but could clearly distinguish between their present identity and previous ones.7 The recovering of past life memories were, for Roger, a way of attaining “emotional catharsis, self-understanding, and healing”8 because they moved “the conflicts from the stuck places in the rememberer’s current life to an entirely new context.” Roger wrote: “By becoming ‘another person’ through the suggestion of the therapist, the ego is relieved of the burden of confronting ‘real’ parents, ‘real’ losses, ‘real’ disabilities, and so on.”9 Roger was not attempting to convince people of the truth of reincarnation, but only referring to the positive effects he claimed this kind of therapy had on his patients: “First, and most obviously, the psychotherapist is mainly concerned with helping the patient get better, not in proving a theory or in promoting a doctrine. As I said earlier, I tell all my clients that it doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not for past life therapy to be effective.”10 In the eighth chapter of his book, “Eros Abused: The Past Life Roots of Sexual and Reproductive Problems,” Roger treats problems related to the feminine, and his conclusions appear particularly relevant to understanding his idea of the Magdalene archetype described later: From treating a sizable number of these cases from a past perspective I have come to identify a common unconscious denominator at work,

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karmicly speaking—what I might call an archetype of the wounded feminine. This archetype is, I believe, commonly, or should I say symbolically, mirrored in the sexual and gynecological dysfunctions of certain women. What they are painfully and often embarrassingly manifesting at an organic or deep emotional level is no less than the psychic accumulation of the hatred and fear of the feminine that has fueled much of Western culture for over two thousand years.11 Roger claimed that these wounds were felt not only by women but also by men, because all his patients had experienced being women and men in previous lives. He related his own memory of being a young girl who had been raped, mutilated, and killed and its effects on his groin area.12 I was struck by the facility with which pilgrims who had attended Roger’s workshops were able to remember a certain number of past lives in detail and at how easily they talked about them. The recovering of past life memories happened spontaneously or were stimulated through specific relaxation techniques, like those used during Roger’s sessions. In both cases, the episode the pilgrim perceived as a past-life moment and the feelings associated with it were never acknowledged just out of curiosity. Rather they helped the person to better understand—and eventually overcome—physical or psychological problems of the present. In the context of past lives the energy discourse provided a way to test the accuracy of recuperated memories and its effects on the present life. Memories surfaced as a sort of energy package containing mental imageries, emotions and sensations and these contents were expressed in the person’s body. In this context if the energy associated to the memories was related to painful events and was therefore determined to be heavy, it needed to be released or it would affect the person’s present physical and psychological well-being (as with Roger’s groin).

“Choosing to Be a Nun or a Woman” Some pilgrims could not remember negative experiences related to Christianity in their present lives but referred to episodes from past lives to explain their critical attitude toward the Church. Others recounted negative experiences in both present and past lives, and some had even discovered a pattern of confrontation with the Church during their spiritual evolution through progressive lives. This kind of pattern was particularly evident in the case of Luciana, who with her partner Gianmiche helped Celso to run the pilgrimage. Luciana13 was in her late thirties and had dark curly hair and dreamy brown eyes. She grew up in Rome, the center of Catholicism, in a conservative Catholic

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family and went to a school run by nuns. When she was young, she wanted to take vows but her parents finally convinced her to study economics, and she became a consultant in her father’s business. Nevertheless, she continued to be attracted to the idea of convent life. In her thirties, she began to participate into workshops and eventually got to know Celso and his seminars about the Andean tradition. During a workshop in Pitigliano in Tuscany, where Celso used energy techniques to explore Etruscan sites, Luciana met Gianmichele. They fell in love, and both started working with Celso. Unlike Gianmichele, Luciana never considered changing her job. She still lived with her family, who were critical of her spiritual interests. Her mother often accused her of being a bad Catholic. Luciana’s maternal grandmother had inherited (from the female line) a ritual to take away the evil eye (malocchio), and taught it to Luciana when she was about twelve years old. Both Luciana and her mother were used to receiving messages from this grandmother, whose imminent death had been announced to Luciana in a kind of vision. Luciana’s struggle to break free from Catholic moral rules had been long and painful. During the trip she was traveling with her partner, Gianmichele, who at the time was still married. The pilgrimage therefore represented a crucial moment in her personal moral battle. From her teens onward, she had read books about paranormal phenomena, UFOs, and spirituality. Even though she knew that the ideas presented in those texts were in conflict with the Catholic belief system, she felt all right about doing this. She thought that unless and until she actively experienced these things herself (sulla mia pelle), none of her actions was really in breach of the rules established by the Holy Roman Church. Trouble began in her thirties, when she fell in love with a man who was having a relationship with a friend of hers. Luciana felt totally overwhelmed by her passion and called this man, who aroused her femininity, her “angel /demon.” To escape from the situation, she joined an organized trip to Peru. There was a battle going on inside her: The nun personality she felt inside was telling her “One cannot do this sort of thing,” while the “woman” inside felt a strong physical attraction toward that man: “I shook off this nun-part of myself only a little while ago. As a nun, I could not accept a kind of feeling that was not just a pure, angel-like feeling” (April 9, 2005). Luciana had strong spiritual experiences while visiting Macchu Picchu. She began to feel that in order to find a new balance she needed to allow herself to live as a woman in a very concrete and material way. She met a twenty-two-yearold man and later wrote to him. He helped her to understand that she did not need to choose between being a nun and being a woman, but could be both. Fascinated by her experience in Peru, Luciana attended one of Celso’s workshops about the Andean tradition and eventually met Gianmichele. Once again, Luciana was in a moral dilemma, in love with a man already involved with another woman. Gianmichele had already decided to divorce his wife, but legally

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they were still married. Some time later, when Luciana and Gianmichele had formed a stable couple, Celso told her, referring to Gianmichele’s past commitment in Grassroots Communities: “Instead of becoming a nun, you have found your priest.” Thanks to Gianmichele and the workshops with Celso, Luciana came to realize that being a nun could actually mean being a priestess, and that she could be a priestess and a nun: an intermediary between the spiritual world and the real world. Helping Gianmichele during a ritual they made to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Luciana felt extremely powerful and totally at ease, in a way that did not prevent her from living out her sexuality: I had realized that I was able to channel, but I did not explore this possibility completely. There are things that I feel belong to me, but they scare me. In some remote corner of my mind, the Catholic religion keeps working as an inquisitory brake [freno inquisitore].14 For this reason, when I have certain sensations there is a part of me that feels guilty, that feels witch-like . . . It is not easy to let emotions flow, as Gianmichele tells me to do. I 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 learnt, 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 witch-like [stregonesco], nothing at all. (April 9, 2005) In Luciana’s explanation, an interplay among three different terms emerged. All three referred to women with particular spiritual powers or attributes: nun, priestess, and witch. Luciana had not totally assimilated the position so widespread among Neopagans that “witch” is a positive term that describes a powerful and wise woman with healing capacities. Even though she stated that being a witch was “not so terrible after all,” she still saw the term “witch-like” as negative and felt the need to underline that there was nothing witch-like in acting as an intermediary between Mother Earth and the world. Luciana still seemed to consider “nun” a positive term, describing a spiritual choice she had not been able to follow in its entirety. But she also believed that being a nun and being a woman were mutually contradictory, as if in renouncing her sexuality she would cease to be the woman she felt she was. On the other hand, the witch seemed to involve being too much of a woman, not only not being the buonina (the “good girl”) but being a bad girl, a witch-like woman. This witchiness was clearly related to sexuality, unconventional sexual behavior and

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sexual pleasure. If the concepts of nun and the witch were diametrically opposed, the priestess reconciled their forces, leading to a balanced middle way. Not total chastity, nor sexual excess, but sacred sexuality. Dana did not feel totally at ease with the term witch (bruja) either. When talking with me about the Neopagan movement, she told me that she did not like Wiccan methods and ideals, and she emphasized that neither she nor the women from the Goddess Wood called themselves witches or performed magic rituals. Most women from the Goddess Wood, while critical of the total negation of sexuality that being a nun implied, did not perceive nuns negatively. Some of them told me that they had been nuns in past lives. They had not been able to retrieve details about these lives, but felt that having been nuns in the past, this time it was not their turn to lead a life of contemplation and chastity. For these women there existed continuity and not a rupture between their past as nuns and their current spiritual training as potential priestesses. Like Celso, Dana established a good relationship with the nuns of the Hôtellerie of the Sainte-Baume. Both seemed to feel at ease when relating to priests, nuns or male religious. The term “priestess” (sacerdotessa, sacerdotisa, sacerdotesa) helped to bridge the potentially dangerous opposition of nuns)the brides of Christ) and witches (the lovers of the devil). As the female counterpart of the word “priest,” it also contained the Latin term sacrum (sacred), and evoked the capacity of the priestess to act as an intermediary between the sacred and the profane world. For the Goddess Wood members, priestesses, unlike nuns, could have sex. However, they did not have sexual intercourse for pure pleasure, but used the energy liberated during the union to experience elevation. Like Mary Magdalene, who for them was a priestess of the Goddess, they could initiate men into the sexual mysteries. Pilgrims from all three groups spoke about their past lives as Cathars or Knights Templar. They normally mentioned this as one of the reasons why they had felt attracted to Southern France and had investigated the Sangraal theories that linked Magdalene with these two movements. Unlike Roger’s pilgrims, who felt quite comfortable when speaking about their past lives, Luciana and the others had not learned any particular methods to deal with them and felt uncomfortable talking about them, stressing their doubts about the real origin and meaning of what they had experienced in places related to the Templars or the Cathars. At Chartres, one of the last stops in Celso’s pilgrimage, Luciana became upset, feeling herself to be a traitor. She knew this feeling from a visit to a small Italian church said to have belonged to the Templars. In Chartres, Luciana connected the sense of guilt she felt toward the Church as an institution with the fact that she was sharing a bed with a married man in a house of God (a hostel for Catholic pilgrims near the cathedral). Luciana had felt uncomfortable at the Hôtellerie of the Sainte-Baume, but in Chartres she felt desperate, and finally asked

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Gianmichele to sleep in a separate bed. Yet ironically, as we will see, it emerged that when Gianmichele and his wife first wanted to marry, priests in Piemonte had actually refused to perform the ceremony, and they had an ersatz wedding in a center of the Christian Grassroots Communities. So from a strictly Catholic point of view, Gianmichele and his wife were not married anyway and had been living in sin. Events from past lives were only considered relevant in the context of trying to understand present situations and difficulties. What had supposedly happened in past lives tended to show up in the present one as compulsive behavior or as a particular fear, aversion, attachment, or some other marked personality trait. As in Leonard’s case described below, Luciana and other pilgrims felt that they might have been victims or torturers incorporating the moral values of the Church and using them to harm others.

Gianmichele and Leonard: Even Unorthodox Catholic Movements Ignore the Dark Side When I first spoke to Leonard in 2004, he reminded me of Gianmichele, whom I had known since 2000. Both were gentle, protective, and caring. As I later learned, there were significant similarities between Gianmichele’s and Leonard’s lives and their quest for the feminine dark side. Luciana and Elisabeth, their respective partners, also had much in common. They shared a painful relationship with Christian values; and both had begun a new life with new partners. In their thirties, Leonard and Gianmichele had been part of Catholic movements that were not recognized by the official Church; both had left them feeling that the movements did not satisfy their need to relate to the female side and to Mother Earth. Gianmichele had shining dark eyes and a short dark-grey beard. He was born in 1956 and grew up in the town of Alba near Torino and studied Chemistry at the university of Torino. On leaving university he married and he and his wife had two children. He was working in a factory as manager for the Department of Quality, Research and Development. A political activist, he had belonged to a trade union and was a leading member of Legambiente, the most important Italian ecological movement. Brought up as a Catholic, he had been attracted to spirituality since he was young but had never totally identified with the Catholic faith. During his university time in Torino he got in touch with the Comunitá Cristiane di Base (CDB), the Italian Grassroots Communities. Seeking to get back to the original Christian communities, Gianmichele and his companions discussed theological questions and supported the right of women to administer communion.15 As a member of a grassroots community, Gianmichele could not have a Catholic marriage and had trouble getting his two sons baptized. Now

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adolescent, they were active members of the local Catholic community and had been scouts since their childhood. In the early 1990s, Gianmichele learned alternative healing techniques for his migraine headaches. After this first successful experience, he began to attend seminars and to read about alternative healing methods. After meeting Celso, he went through a period of crisis and change. Celso’s seminars on the Andean tradition helped Gianmichele to understand that he wanted a different life. He separated from his wife and gradually abandoned his participation in the trade union and in Legambiente, whose ideals he no longer identified with. At the time of pilgrimage Gianmichele was doing a three-year degree on naturopathy and was planning to leave his job at the factory, move to Rome to live with Luciana, and work as a naturopath. He led workshops teaching energy techniques from the Andean tradition. The Christian grassroots communities that Gianmichele belonged to advocated a return to the principles of the first Christian communities, where both men and women celebrated the Eucharist. He himself used to celebrate mass as a layperson, and for the first ten years he felt comfortable discussing his viewpoints and doubts openly inside the community. At the beginning of the 1990s, then approaching forty, Gianmichele felt that the Grassroots Communities were becoming too narrow for him. The questions he posed were always answered with explanations of faith, and the biblical readings and community life were no longer enough for him. He experienced a gap between his experiences in the community and the ecological Legambiente movement, on the one hand, and his more recent and individual spiritual experiences, on the other: All these community experiences began to be meaningless for me, even if I do not want here to negate their validity. They had no significance for me in terms of my spiritual experiences. I was a national leader for Legambiente and was part of the national scientific sector for water and waste. I worked a lot. I came to see these things were as if working on the final links of a chain whose first links were never touched. It was like running after things whose real origin was somewhere else . . . To give an example . . . after campaigning for years to teach people how to sort rubbish [for recycling], or to conserve resources, I realized that, in reality, it was impossible to obtain permanent changes, even in the younger generations. Because, in fact, what was probably at the base of this behavior was a bad relationship with the universe, with the cosmos. It made no sense. If you ignore the relationship you have with Mother Earth, then any effort to raise awareness is useless, because the basic cause cannot be understood. Our efforts lost their efficacy if people were not conscious of who they were and what kind of relationship they had with the cosmos. (April 3, 2005)

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Gianmichele felt that if he really wanted to contribute to change in people’s attitudes, he had to work toward a shift in their mentality and consciousness that would affect whole generations rather than individuals. What needed to be changed was the “information people had at the bottom of their heart.”16 At the same time that Gianmichele was questioning the meaningfulness of his religious community and his ecological activism, he was experiencing a mayor crisis in his marriage. In Celso’s seminars about the Andean tradition, Gianmichele found out more about men’s female side, the creative power of sexuality, and the importance of Mother Earth; in one of Celso’s groups, he also met Luciana. Leonard, travelling with his wife Elisabeth in Roger’s group, had been part of the Liberal Catholic Church in the United States. This church was founded by James I. Wedgewood and Charles Leadbeater in 1916, and from the start the church had a close association with theosophism. In the early 1960s he had obtained a BS in business administration in Virginia, and at twenty-six was introduced by some friends to the Liberal Catholic Church (LCC). Fascinated by this Church’s perspective on Christianity, he began the four-year training course, became a priest, and also obtained a MA in education. During the training he met his first wife, who already had three children, and they married in 1973. They moved to California and created a private school for children, as Leonard had been originally trained as a Waldorf teacher through the work of Rudolf Steiner. Leonard kept serving as a priest but supported his family through the school, since the LCC did not pay its priests. In 1985 he began feeling disconnected and lacking grounding. He associated both of these feelings with the LCC. Eventually Leonard left the Liberal Catholic Church, realizing that in the Christian system the feminine, earthly aspects of life were being denied and condemned. The family moved to Virginia, where Leonard wrote a PhD thesis in education on distance learning; by that time the couple had expanded their school and were coordinating Waldorf home-schooling as well. Leonard continued for some time to celebrate the mass on his own and to pray, but gradually he moved to a more Buddhist approach. In 1995, the family moved to New England and opened an enlarged the school there. In 2002 Leonard’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, and she died that same year. Some months later Leonard met Elisabeth, and they married in 2004. With Elisabeth, Leonard became interested in understanding the feminine polarity more deeply, and this was one of the reasons that led him to join Roger’s pilgrimage. He had already attended several of Roger’s workshops on past life therapy. As Leonard explained it to me, Liberal Catholics believed that certain rituals had lost their original power, because the basic scheme of the mass had been changed so much throughout the centuries. Leadbeater and Wedgewood redesigned the mass to make it a more effective channel for spiritual energy. Leonard trained and became a priest within this tradition, met his first wife there, and

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married in this church. In the early 1980s he was appointed by the bishop to be the head of the Liberal Catholic Institute of Studies. The way he described the ritual of the mass in terms of raising and moving energy reminded me of Clara’s analysis of the old mass celebrated at the cave of the Sainte-Baume. But whereas Clara felt that the priest who celebrated the pre-Vatican II mass was moving the energy “in an impeccable way,” Leonard found that the Catholic mass had lost most of its power and only the central part of the mass, the canon, had never been touched and therefore conserved its original effect. Like Gianmichele, Leonard felt that something was lacking in his church, and the members of his community were not able to answer his questions. These questions related to the feminine side Leonard experienced inside himself, and to the simultaneous fear of, and attraction toward, what he identified as “the dark side”: I started reaching a point where I was feeling sort of disconnected within my self, not unified. I was feeling that the work I was doing in the church was really contributing to my sense of being ungrounded, sort of lacking a polarity. I felt that the church was really working with the spiritual polarity but was not working with the earthly polarity. So I spoke with the bishops and did counseling to resolve this. Most of them would say I should do the mass more often and I said well, I am doing it every day; that I had to pray more, I prayed many times a day. I gradually became aware that within the Catholic structure and within the Christian structure there is very much a dualistic system: it’s good and evil; black and white; man and female. And it’s based upon denying the one polarity and moving to the other polarity .  .  . And even the church denied the feminine and it moved towards the masculine .  .  . I felt that for my own evolution I needed to stay in a structure that could integrate light and darkness and was not trying to push one away. I ended up leaving the church. (October 5, 2005) Leonard had a deep longing for the dark side, related to the mysteries of the feminine energy. He was also afraid of it, but could not accept being part of a congregation that tried to hide it or to dismiss it as evil. Like Luciana, Leonard discovered that the attraction toward the feminine and his strong link to Catholic figures and rituals were in some way related to his past lives. As in Luciana’s case, memories about Leonard’s past lives had emerged during a visit of Chartres cathedral in the 1970s. The first remembrance that I had of being in the church (during past lives) was very early, when I got involved in the [Liberal Catholic] church and I

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was on a trip to Europe. And went to Chartres and was just—decimated. I was just hit so hard by remembrances of being in lot of stories in France being a monk, a Catholic monk in monasteries and I had an awareness of that and carried it with me for many years. But it wasn’t until I got together with Elisabeth and we started doing Roger’s work, that I started to recover more of those experiences and to see that I had had many lives in monasteries and then also lives in the Catholic hierarchy and going through times being very ambitious. And that, actually, was not separate from some of the atrocities that had been committed by the Catholic hierarchy, but I actually was in the proper trade of some of these myself. (October 5, 2005) Elisabeth’s husband did not exclude the possibility that during his past lives as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, he might have been one of the priests, bishops, or cardinals responsible for the tortures suffered by his wife in her past lives. He observed: I think it’s part of the whole sickness of the Catholic denial of sexuality and the Catholic insistence for celibacy for priests. I think it’s just unbalanced and creates enormous distortions. I began to feel that being a perpetrator and uncovering that and taking responsibility for that within myself was part of my own healing process. Being able to acknowledge that I am not a victim that I have also been a cause of some of it too. And for me it brings a full cycle; for some of the pain I have suffered within the Catholic Church is brought about by my own actions . . . So in a karmic sense I had to experience the other side of that—I had to experience the pain that I had brought to others. So that’s a great healing for me to be aware of that and to be able to bring it out into the light. (October 5, 2005) Form his Buddhist experiences, Leonard knew that according to the law of karma, actions from past lives that had harmed others could result in harmful experiences in the present. Knowledge about his past lives allowed him to understand and accept the events of the present one. Part of facing his dark side had consisted in recognizing his torturer part and in no longer considering himself only a victim. For both Elisabeth and Leonard, reentering churches after a long time was a moving experience. Whereas Leonard felt a sense of familiarity inside them, remembering his period in the Liberal Catholic Church, Elisabeth did not feel immediately comfortable. Only after several days of visiting churches did she begin to feel better. Listening to Elisabeth’s life narrative and to the past life experiences she believed she had recovered thanks to Roger’s therapy, one could hardly blame her for not feeling at ease in churches.

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Elisabeth, a Single Mother Confronting Catholic Morality Most pilgrims in Roger’s group were accustomed to acknowledging and using what they held to be their past life experiences. Several had attended Roger’s workshops and openly deployed their past life experiences to explain their present situation, their feelings, and their spiritual adventures during the pilgrimage. Three of them told me that they remembered several past lives related to Christian faith and religious structures. Katrina and Leonard had memories of having been priests and nuns, whereas Elisabeth felt that she had been persecuted, tortured, and abused by members of the Church after one very happy life of communal cave dwelling during the aftermath of Jesus’s death. As we will see, Elisabeth’s case shows how decisions and situations of the present life mirrored those of past lives. Elisabeth, like other pilgrims using Roger’s therapy, maintained that if one did not acknowledge past life patterns of behavior, these would repeat not only in this but also in future lives. Red-haired and blue-eyed with fair skin, Elisabeth looked at me with an air of dreamy wonder. She had a soft voice and gentle manner. She was born in 1945 into a family where men from her paternal side had been Protestant ministers for generations and women from the maternal side had been teachers. She said that her father, a minister and college counselor, had sexually abused her during childhood and that her mother did not protect her. An older brother had also been allowed to make her life miserable. At twenty years old, Elisabeth dropped out of college and moved to lower Manhattan, where she actively participated in the racial integration, feminist, and antiwar movements of the 1960s. A poet and writer, she joined various artists’ groups and made clothing to earn a living. She fell in love with a Chinese artist (who had immigrated to California as a child) when she was thirty-one, and they shared a farm in upstate New York without running water. They heated their house with wood, grew vegetables, and raised all sorts of animals, on just two thousand dollars a year. They had two children and were unmarried. In her forties, Elisabeth left the farm to finish college and live as a single mother, restoring another farmhouse nearby. She later obtained a master’s degree in social work from Syracuse University and moved to Vermont to work in a psychiatric unit. During her twenties, Elisabeth had read many Chinese women poets and studied Zen Buddhism. She went to a Jungian psychoanalyst and, hearing of Roger’s work, took his training course and became certified to use it in her therapy practice as well as train others. On a meditation retreat in 2003, Elisabeth met Leonard. They sat together in the same room meditating in total silence for three days before talking to one other. They married in 2004 on a trek through Tibet and lived together in Vermont. She brought Leonard into Roger’s workshops. Speaking of her past lives, Elisabeth explained:

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I spent many years being a single mother. In the regression work I’ve done in the past fifteen years, probably maybe thirty of my lives have been revealed, and many of them are of being a healer, being cast out by the church fathers, being an herbalist or being in a situation where I was a single mother, where my children might be taken from me by the church fathers and that kind of thing. Over and over again, I felt so betrayed by the church, and so nature became like my religion . . . My memory went back to a very early incarnation when I chose to be a healer in Lemuria17 and I realized that I had to take on the deepest wounds to be able to be a good healer. So that was the path I followed, taking on the wounds of sexual abuse over the centuries. (October 6, 2005) Elisabeth felt that she had chosen to experience wounding in her past lives in order to be able to be a healer. Inherent in her interpretation was an idea I heard many times: that the shaman or the therapist is always a “wounded healer,” somebody able to cure his or her own wounds and therefore those of others. Another idea that emerges here is that before reincarnating the soul can choose what kind of family situation and life experiences it will take on, selecting a life that will allow it to evolve according to the karmic pattern determined by previous lives. According to this adaptation of Buddhist theories, it is believed that the souls of people one has known intimately in one past life can reappear in another.18 Elisabeth and Leonard felt that they had known each other in other lives and Leonard even thought that he might have been one of Elisabeth’s torturers. Elisabeth had met Leonard in a Buddhist meditation retreat, and both had been practicing Buddhist meditation for years. When Elisabeth married him, first in Lhasa, Tibet in 2004 and later in the United States, she said that she felt this was an important step, after a long period as a single woman and mother (in terms of past lives and of her present life). A year later, the couple decided to go on Roger’s pilgrimage. Like some other pilgrims I met, Elisabeth remembered meeting with Jesus in a past life while she was a servant girl to the Roman soldiers. When she entered the two churches the group visited in Marseille on the first day, Elisabeth perceived the contrast between the love of Jesus and his message, on the one hand, and the way both had been used to justify brutal acts by Catholics, on the other. On the second day, she found that the cave of the Sainte-Baume brought together her memories of living in caves with the first Christians, where men and women lived in cooperative communities, and later memories of being a victim of the Christian stigmatization of women. As she pointed out, the first Christian churches had actually been caves and catacombs, places inside Mother Earth’s womb, and this aspect had been practically lost in later churches, which were built upward toward the sky. The Sainte-Baume cave combined aspects of primitive and later churches. Elisabeth’s sense of her past lives as a single mother rejected by the Church resonated with the present life experience of Roger’s mother, who had felt that

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she could no longer belong to a church that considered her a sinner as a result of her divorce. As a single mother in a small English town in the 1950s, Roger’s mother had turned to spiritualist practices and attended channeling sessions. Elisabeth had chosen to live on the edges of mainstream society, living on a farm without running water or plumbing. As the mother of Asian American children living with a Chinese man, she had to overcome cultural stigmas of poverty and having an interracial family, although within her chosen milieu of artists and spiritual practitioners it was not seen as a problem. As we have seen throughout this chapter, a common thread in most of the accounts of past lives I listened to were memories of the physical and symbolic violence that the Church had inflicted on women through the centuries. Perceiving themselves as part of the systematic denigration of women’s dignity and sexuality, whether as victims or torturers, these pilgrims were now looking for a different way of approaching the Christian world. As Courtney Bender observes, past lives are “important social products through which their participants shape current relationships and understand their place in the world. Determining or discussing past life does not merely extend a person’s history back in time. It additionally adds another layer of mystical connection and history to a person’s genealogical history, mixing up and complicating ideas of familial duty and attraction.”19 As we can see in the case of Elisabeth and Leonard, their past lives not only allowed them to make sense of their present life experiences with Christian religions and institutions; they also legitimated their choice for a different kind of spirituality and allowed them to see their relationship from a different perspective. For them as for other pilgrims, past lives helped to reinforce partnerships and friendships, legitimate the rupture from one’s own cultural social and religious family heritage, and explain life choices.20 The pilgrims’ past life stories do not replace their present life narratives, but are intertwined with them; there is a constant coming and going between past and present lives and this process allows the pilgrims to see social commitments as well as religious engagements in a different light. What emerges from these other lives is again a social and religious critique of the Church. The fact that the pilgrims feel they have been witnesses, victims, and even perpetrators of the Church’s abuses in their past lives gives them increased authority to criticize it. Mary Magdalene was a key figure in the pilgrims’ process of healing their relationship with past and present Christianity. Like them, she had been wounded by this religious system, in her case stigmatized as a harlot and repentant sinner; now that she had been restored to her own dignity and power, her example could help pilgrims to heal similar wounds.

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Celebrating Menstrual Blood

We have seen that the pilgrims considered themselves the heirs of an ancient pre-Christian and prepatriarchal pagan cult of the Goddess. They blamed Christians with their notions of women as sinful daughters of Eve for the persecution of witches. The pilgrims maintained that a world-denying and body-mortifying Christian attitude was at the root of most present-day evils and the principal cause of the exploitation of the planet. The pilgrimage leaders emphasized the need to reconsecrate matter and reclaim a deep connection with Mother Earth. They saw the menstrual cycle as a key element in the process of reversing Christianity’s systematic devaluation of the body, particularly the female body.1 Both Celso and Dana invited pilgrims to offer menstrual blood to Mother Earth at the Sainte-Baume. Menstrual blood was not an issue for Roger’s pilgrims, as the women of the group had all attained menopause. In any case along with his former wife Roger had previously organized seminars on the importance of menstruation and the reproductive cycle. He shared most of the theories about menstruation explained below and he was familiar with one of the pilgrims’ basic texts on the subject, The Wise Wound.2 Dana and the Goddess Wood members made an explicit connection between Mary Magdalene and menstrual blood. Celso’s pilgrims did so indirectly. Influenced by their reading, the members of the Goddess Wood believed that Native American women used to menstruate together in moon huts, following the moon’s cycle, sitting on moss, and bleeding directly onto the earth. Both Celso and Dana maintained that when women offered their blood to Mother Earth, they revived an ancient matriarchal ritual that had been wiped out by Christianity. They held that with the gradual imposition of patriarchal values, the flow of blood expressing women’s power to give birth came to be considered impure and even dangerous. The group leaders interpreted psychological and physical symptoms generally identified as premenstrual syndrome as manifestations of the general discomfort of women living in a world with men’s rules. They felt that such symptoms would disappear if women recognized their periods as sacred moments during which they were particularly likely to receive higher insights. 145

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This chapter explores in detail the pilgrims’ theories about menstruation, the most important texts influencing them, and their ways of establishing through ritual the sacrality of menstrual blood. Like the postcolonial ritual practices of the followers of the Churches of Zion in South Africa described by Jean Comaroff in her 1985 book Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, the rituals described below seemed to express the pilgrims’ desire for social and political transformation. The pilgrims sought to appropriate what they perceived to be a key symbol of femininity and to modify and control the meanings and bodily practices associated to it. They shared the attitude of Lara Owen, one of the most influential authors on the power of menstruation: “When you find the places where a culture splits from a natural truth you have found a key—a way inside the diseases of the culture.”3

The Wise Wound We have seen that the pilgrims were assiduous readers4 and that the leaders of the three organized pilgrimages read out loud passages that backed up their assertions. In the case of the offering of menstrual blood, Dana’s and Celso’s theories derived directly or indirectly from books and articles about menstruation and female spirituality published in the 1990s such as Lara Owen’s popular article “The Sabbath of Women” (1991), Vicki Noble’s Shakti Woman (1991), and Miranda and Robert Gray’s Red Moon (1994). In these works menstruation is a wise counselor that allows women to learn about their psychological problems and heal themselves. When texts like these about the moon’s influence on women’s cycle and menstrual blood’s ritual power had any bibliographical references at all, they referred to Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove’s book The Wise Wound (1978). It contains not only the most common theories about menstruation I had heard from the pilgrims, but also their main ideas about Mary Magdalene. While the book itself had not been translated into Spanish or Italian, the pilgrims had read its main theories in translations of Shakti Woman or Nancy Qualls-Corbett’s The Sacred Prostitute (1988). A source in turn for Shuttle, Redgrove, and Roger Woolger was the work of John Layard (1891–1974). Roger Woolger told me that in the 1980s he and Peter Redgrove had both been in analysis with Layard, who was an early student of Carl G. Jung. In 1971 Redgrove used Layard’s methods to psychoanalyze his wife Penelope Shuttle in an attempt to alleviate her premenstrual depressions. Layard had been an anthropologist, and in 1914 accompanied W.H.R. Rivers on a year-long expedition to the New Hebrides island of Atchin. In his books5 psychological, mythological, and anthropological data are intertwined. Redgrove and Shuttle use this approach as well; with psychological, mythological, and ethnographical data they set out to analyze menstruation as a “great and

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neglected resource” that had been transformed into a sickness in order to make women feel inferior. In their introduction, Shuttle and Redgrove use the Grail quest as a central metaphor for their research: King Amfortas, its guardian, whose wounds bled day and night, and all the assembled company in that castle waited for Parsifal to ask the simple and natural but magical question that would put an end to the desolation that surrounded them . . . And that question was no more than, “This Cup that bleeds, what is it for?” We think that the mythic question has such power in the legend precisely because it can be asked in fact. The question we can ask is: “What does my bloodshed every month mean?” Women through the ages have asked this question, and the Wasteland answer they have received from the male knights (who believe that because they do not bleed they do not have to ask the question) when they have been answered at all, has been: “It is a curse.” We do not think this is the true answer.6 The two authors refer to the blood of the Grail cup as menstrual blood and their interpretations of the Grail legend in psychological terms seems to have influenced The Dreamer of the Vine (1980), a historical novel about Nostradamus’ life. Its author, Liz Greene, an astrologer and Jungian psychologist, suggests that Nostradamus might have known about the true identity of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s companion and the mother of his children. Greene is the sister of Richard Leigh, coauthor of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), and she clearly influenced the three authors’ research for this latter book. Shuttle and Redgrove’s book appears to be the theoretical foundation not only for most of the pilgrims’ theories and their menstrual offerings but also for the most popular theories about Mary Magdalene relating her with the Holy Grail. According to Shuttle and Redgrove, menstruation is a blessing that was turned into a curse and this inversion, labeling more than half the world’s population as inferior, may explain the aggressiveness of Western civilization. On page after page, issues appear that return again and again in later popular books about Mary Magdalene and female spirituality. After describing the Song of Songs as “an anti-Bible within the Bible” and “a poem of Tantric vividness,” the authors denounce the split created by Christianity between the childless lover and the mother and refer to Mary Magdalene as “the prostitute: the woman who had sex without having a child” and to the Virgin Mary as “the woman who had a child without having sex.”7 In Christian terms, menstruation therefore appears as Eve’s curse and evokes fear and pain. But if a woman learns not to be afraid of her sexuality and the monthly blood she sheds, neither menstruation nor childbirth need to be painful experiences. Menstruation is seen like “a moment of

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truth which will not sustain lies” and leads women to face the lies Western society is based upon: “It is as though the two kinds of love-juice, the red and the white, the childless and the child-giving, corresponded with these two aspects of woman’s nature. It is the red aspect which is despised, tabooed, neglected, and which, as if in response to this spiteful treatment, in many women hurts . . . But we can see how shocking an unaccustomed attitude to menstruation may be if we think of the Virgin Mary menstruating.”8 Drawing on Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation,9 the authors claim that male rites of circumcision at puberty and all sacrifices in general are reduced to menstrual sacrifices.10 Unable to establish a spiritual relationship to their menstrual period, Western women lose a great opportunity to develop their own contemporary shamanism. Left alone with the insight offered by the cycle yet unable to use its transformative powers, the tabooed menstruating woman ends up aggressive and in pain. Drawing on the theories by the Jungian Ann Ulanov, Shuttle and Redgrove relate Black Madonnas to the dark side of female deities and the feminine shadow inside men,11 whereas the Christian devil, compared with the Celts’ god Cernunnos, appears as the menstruating woman’s animus.12 The authors list other theories about menstruation, and these theories subsequently turn up in female spiritual treatments of menstruation. I summarize the list here: Women invented agriculture by mixing the seed corn with menstrual blood as a fertilizer. All rites of blood-sacrifice are a monstrification of menstruation and its importance for the continuity of human society. The ancient Greeks used menstrual seclusion huts, as did many indigenous cultures of the past and present. Shamanism is originally a female practice related to the moon cycle and to menstruation. Witchcraft is related to menstruation and therefore a natural gift of women.13 Labeling witch persecution as “menstrual murder,” the authors conclude: “Let us summarize our argument: witchcraft is the natural craft of the woman. It is this because witchcraft is the subjective experience of the menstrual cycle. Witchcraft gives names and activities to the cycle; by means of witchcraft women have been able to structure their cycle and know it. Because it is a woman’s reality, and because women can fulfill themselves and come into their proper powers by understanding their menstrual cycles, it has been denigrated ceaselessly by men, who fear women and who wish them to under-achieve.”14 The Wise Wound came out of Penelope Shuttle’s depression and severe premenstrual pain. According to the authors, each woman who bravely starts out to discover her own menstrual cycle and transform the negativity about it will find

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her own way to her own source of power. Published in 1978, it was the earliest common source I could find among all the ideas and texts about menstruation the pilgrims cited. It shed light on the strategy used to confront the Christian belief system in the pilgrims’ discourses and rituals, which consisted in accepting the basic tenets of the Christian cosmovision, its images, symbols, stories, and rituals but attributing the exact opposite meaning to them. In this reinterpretation, the Christian tenet was seen as patriarchal and misogynist while the new version claimed to be more authentic, and more sexually egalitarian. By assuming the basic tenets of the Christian belief system as a departure point, the authors and pilgrims left unchallenged some of the basic misogynist assumptions in Christian texts and beliefs. Shuttle and Redgrove accept, for instance, that most of the women burnt in witchcraft persecutions really were witches, not ordinary women who confessed under torture, and thereby end up confirming the witch-hunters’ assumptions.15 They also confirm the idea that all women are potential witches whose basis for power is menstruation. The good— apparently revolutionary—news is that being a witch is something positive for women and allows them to discover their real power. The pilgrims presented their theories as antipatriarchal and revolutionary, but many of the texts they drew upon took for granted certain assumptions about women and their reproductive cycle. Feminist critiques of scientific discourse about the female reproductive cycle have analysed the strategies of portraying the bodies of women as totally different from those of men. The discourse labels women’s bodies as dysfunctional and exposed to physical changes like menstruation and menopause that make women lose control, and has been used to justify sexual inequality.16 As with the Gregorian Magdalene that the pilgrims criticized but could not do without, it seems that they could not totally reject certain assumptions about the female body because they needed them as a starting point for their spiritual theories and practices. As we will see exploring Lara Owen’s life story below, if certain feminists consider it dangerous to put too much emphasis on menstruation, others, like the pilgrims, feel that its sacralization can represent a turning point in the conceptualization of femininity and the empowerment of women.

From Daughters of Copper Woman to The Sabbath of Women Dana said her ideas about the sacrality of menstrual blood derived from her personal research in feminist issues, Tibetan Buddhism, and Taoism. Her feminist readings included works of Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Engels, Johann Jakob Bachofen,17 and others more related to feminist spirituality like Diane Stein and Zsuzsanna Budapest.18 According to Dana and her followers, menstrual blood

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and women’s reproductive organs were the place where woman’s greatest power, her creativity, was held. By honoring her own blood a woman honors her power and herself. She should always keep in mind that she did not have to use this power to create children, but could employ it in her work or in her home. Again there is continuity with ancient times and with contemporaries considered the guardians of old traditions: indigenous women.19 As we have seen, Magdalene pilgrims tended to have a pan-Indian conception of Native Americans, talking about them as if they had a common set of beliefs and ritual practices. They had a romantic and Rousseauian notion of American natives, held to be the guardians of the ancient wisdom of Mother Earth and of rituals that were similar to those we once supposedly had. Anne Cameron’s 1981 novel Daughters of Copper Woman seemed to be a key source for pilgrims’ idea of American indigenous people and menstrual Earth rituals. She describes how each menstruating woman passes her “sacred time in a sacred place, sitting on moss and giving her inner blood to the Earth Mother.”20 Cameron presents her book as the result of fieldwork in British Columbia, collecting myths and popular traditions that predate European colonization among the native people of Vancouver Island. The author describes a secret society of women whose members are the guardians of secrets related to female power and wisdom. In her book there is also the recurring idea that these secrets must now be revealed because the time has come. Before the European invaders arrived, there was a time when these women apparently had much more social and spiritual power within the community. Influenced by Cameron’s text and referring to the fact that “in other cultures, rather than being ignored, menstruation has been, and in some cases still is, seen as a time that is special and sacred for women,” Lara Owen defined the menstrual period as “the Sabbath of women” and her article with the same name became a sort of menstrual manifesto.21 Throughout the pilgrimage Dana referred to the article, the Spanish version of which was easily available on the web. Owen argues that in ancient matriarchal societies menstrual blood was considered sacred, but later patriarchal values set in and menstrual blood began to be treated as impure: “I began to understand that the split between, on the one hand, the wisdom and power of bleeding that I was perceiving, and on the other, modern society’s attitudes to the womb, lay at the heart of the subjugation and denial of female reality and experience.”22 Owen published this article in the Whole Earth Review, and following its success published a book, Her Blood is Gold, in 1993. In both works she referred to the two books mentioned before, The Wise Wound and Daughters of Copper Woman, but also to anthropological research on menstrual rituals, particularly Alma Gottlieb and Thomas Buckley’s Blood Magic from 1988. Applying anthropological theories about menstrual rituals to analyze the Magdalene pilgrims’ ritual choices is complicated by the fact that their theories and practices are

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based in part on classic anthropological texts23 such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) or Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966). By the end of the 1980s, a movement to affirm the power and importance of menstruation had developed. Together with movements that helped women to find a new relationship to their vaginas, like that described in The Vagina Monologues,24 workshops on menstruation attempted to provide women with more positive images and ideas about their sexuality. Susan Roberts’s 1994 article “Blood Sisters”25 in the New Age Journal described organizations that provided menarche rites and menstrual consciousness seminars, “working to radically alter the conventional—and overwhelmingly negative—view of menstruation.”26 One of the most important foundations in this area in the United States is the Red Web Foundation.27 In 2007, its advisory board included Vicki Noble, the author of Shakti Woman, and Christiane Northrup, who has published books about woman’s health and sexuality that have been translated into several languages including Spanish and Italian. Most of Dana’s pilgrims were familiar with Northrup’s 1994 book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. In her study about feminist spirituality, Eller emphasizes the importance attributed to menstruation and describes theories similar to those shared by Dana and her pilgrims. She refers to Anne Cameron’s book as a central source28 and describes Brooke Medicine Eagle as “the woman most instrumental in turning spiritual feminist attention to the sanctification of menstruation through the moon lodge” and in modifying “the moon lodge concept” to the needs of contemporary Western women.29 Citing Diane Stein, one of the authors who most influenced Dana, Eller also observes that some feminist spiritualists consider war “patriarchy’s parody of women’s monthly bloodshed,”30 and a male menstrual ritual that now threatens the survival of the planet.31 Like other menstrual activists, most of Dana’s pilgrims dismissed mainstream feminism as denying the female’s body sacrality. In the previously mentioned article Susan Roberts wrote: “Ironically, mainstream feminism, in its quest to minimize the differences between the sexes, has only added to this prejudice. [Tamara] Slayton and others in the emerging menstrual-awareness movement are offering a new type of feminism, one based unabashedly on the body. As Brooke Medicine Eagle, a pioneer in the menstrual-revival movement explains: ‘There is a spiritual power and beauty that builds in women who honor that part of themselves. That’s how women in native cultures got to be so wise— they vision-quested every month at their menses.’”32 During a ritual on the final day of the pilgrimage, Dana’s pilgrims were asked to choose some beliefs, attitudes, or problems they would like to see disappear from the globe. They should shout them out loud. Women shouted things like war, sexual abuse, racism, or poverty. Then the youngest pilgrim, Nuria, a blond Catalan with glasses who had apologized several times for her shyness and for not participating much in the sharing activities of the group, shouted: “Feminism!”

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Shocked, I waited for the women’s reaction. There was no reaction at all; another woman shouted another word and the process went on without interruption. A few months later, I had the opportunity to ask Nuria why she considered feminism to be something that should disappear. She told me that feminists wanted to have the same rights as men and tried to attain this through being like men. According to her, this had led feminists and women influenced by them to deny their femininity and this was not the right way to go.33 Even though the women of Dana’s group did not share this extreme interpretation of and attitude toward feminism, many believed that feminists had missed the point in many areas, particularly relating to spirituality and that, as Estrella had said, there had not yet been a spiritual feminist revolution. In a country like Spain, where feminist ideals could finally break through only after Franco’s death and women’s rights had to be obtained with constant struggle, feminism appeared now as an abstract and undifferentiated entity, related to political issues that did not concern women’s everyday lives and their spirituality. The fact that somebody wanted it to disappear did not cause women to react. Lara Owen, whose life is analyzed below, also told me about her difficulties with feminism when separated from spirituality. She emphasized that in the process of spiritual transformation and in the period that led up to the publication of her book she was greatly helped by men: first Swiftdeer, and then her partner, who supported her financially in California, and finally two other men in publishing. At one point, it was a woman who tried to prevent the publication of Owen’s book about menstruation: “It was a woman vice-president at the first publishing company who approached me, who said: ‘saying that menstruation is a good thing will put back feminism by a hundred years.’ So that deal was cancelled” (May 28, 2005).

“It Did Not Feel Like I Lived Down There” I met the English writer Lara Owen during the spring of 2005 in the little town where she lived in southwestern France. She had a round face that reminded me of a full moon, brown hair down to her shoulders, and a way of approaching me that was both gentle and resolute. In her kitchen she had me sit near a little figure of the Virgin of Montserrat. I had chosen not to read her book before speaking to her, because I did not want the book’s information to influence my approach. Even though the salient points of her life were already narrated in her book, she agreed to go through them with me, and the following information is derived from our conversation. Lara’s writings and her life experiences turned out to be useful for understanding the pilgrims’ viewpoint. They are also a good introduction to the chapter that follows because she seemed to have many things in common with the

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pilgrims. As a child at Sunday school, Lara had felt an attraction toward Mary Magdalene but she had not gone into the subject further. At the time we met, she had a vague idea about the Da Vinci Code phenomenon but had not read the book. Lara was born into an Anglican family in 1955. She described herself as a very religious child who liked Bible stories and regularly read the lesson in church from the age of nine. Both her parents were socially religious in the sense that they had important roles in the local church related to charitable work. Her mother particularly worked to help women in third-world countries. Lara left the church the age of fourteen, after listening to a sermon on the evils of fornication. “I knew it was wrong,” she said. “There was something against the feminine in it and the body was not being respected.” When she was eighteen, she enrolled in American Studies at Warwick University. From 1974 onward, she participated actively in the British countercultural movement and lived in a commune, experimenting with drugs, reading Carlos Castaneda, and taking a particular interest in natural food and natural health care. She said that “the whole thing was like a package, you know; you walked into that field of understanding and obviously other things came with it. Organic gardening, recycling paper, green politics.” Eventually Lara abandoned her political involvement, for only spiritual things really mattered to her: “I had the feeling that the world [of politics] was a harsh place and that I had to create something that was more gentle.” While living in London, Lara started to study Chinese medicine and even traveled to China to study there. For ten years she studied and worked as a Chinese medicine practitioner. She married and became pregnant, but later had a miscarriage and experienced this loss as a major trauma. She found that her partner did not understand her, and some time later they separated. Lara felt that there was a hole in her life and that “it had something to do with not having a clear direction spiritually, not having a community.” In this period Lara attended different spiritual schools and workshops and, in 1986, began to study with Joan Halifax, an American anthropologist teaching what she described as “a mixture of Buddhism and Native American shamanism.” Lara also studied with Harley Swiftdeer, who with others brought to Britain what Lara described as the Native American tradition and organized sweat lodges: Sweat lodges were very important for me at that point and I felt a strong union with the earth. When I was in the sweat lodge I realized that that was what I had been looking for. I had been looking for a church, you know, a ritual space, a sacred space that was of the earth and there was a sense of freedom and a sense of love really. A sense that I was not being judged. I think that in church I had felt that my femaleness, my body were being judged, that I had to cover myself up. And so being naked in a sweat lodge sitting on the earth was a very powerful, transforming experience for me. (May 28, 2005)

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During this time Lara discovered that she had some precancerous cells on her cervix. Talking about this medical problem, she said: “It wasn’t actually that bad, it was quite mild, but it worried me and it made me aware of how much I was not connected to that part of my body. I had these experiences, these painful periods, then this very painful miscarriage and finally these weird cells on my cervix: I mean, it didn’t feel like I lived down there [in my womb], you know, I lived in other places, and my womb was somehow separate from me” (May 28, 2005). In 1986 Lara decided to tell Harley Swiftdeer about this medical problem. In an episode also described in her book, Swiftdeer told Lara: “Dig a hole in the ground and put all your negative feelings about being female into it. You’re still carrying around a lot of negativity about being female.” And that really shocked me, because I had been a feminist for all that time and I had read all those books. I thought I felt good about being a woman. But when I really examined my thoughts and feelings, I felt this apparent comfort was actually rather shallow, and that my sense about feeling good being a woman was still very patriarchal. It was not a real in the body feeling. I still, when I had my period I would say: “No!” you know, I was still negative about it. After this things really begin to turn around. Digging this hole in my garden and speaking my negative feelings into it changed me. I was really shocked to find out how much negativity there was in there. And I noticed that my periods started changing after that and became much easier. I began to really take time when I had the period, to take time out from work. (May 28, 2005) By the end of the 1980s, Lara was struggling to continue her life as a Chinese medicine therapist and her personal research on menstruation. She found it difficult to stop working every time she had her period. She felt the need to retreat and started having dreams about living in California and being a writer. From 1985 to 1990 she had a series of strong spiritual experiences and in 1987 she left her clinic and home in England and moved to California. There she fell in love with a man who supported her in realizing her dream of writing a book about menstruation. In the States Lara attended different workshops and regularly practiced Buddhist meditation. In the spring of 1988, she learned a meditation called Simhamukha practice from Tsultrim Allione, an American woman who had been ordained as a Tibetan nun: “Simhamukha is the lion-headed dakini, and the practice, like most Tantric practices, consists of imagining a complete and very detailed visual image of the dakini, praising her, and then becoming her, while singing a complex chant” (May 28, 2005). After intense experiences with dakini meditation, Lara began to write about menstruation and gradually found out that “there is no one more powerful than

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a woman who is bleeding.” For a long time Lara did not read anything about menstruation because she wanted to see what happened instinctually. She had moved to San Francisco, but every time she had her period she went to her partner’s house on Lake Tahoe to just sit on the earth by the lake: That’s all I would do. I would just sit there and I would watch what happened to me. And I would make notes and I would . . . Most of the time I was just sitting and feeling and I just watched what happened to my energy if I had nothing else to do at all, no responsibility . . . whatsoever, for five days over the time of my period. To discover what was actually going on inside my body and what was it that wanted to happen, that until that point had been showing itself through symptoms. Because by then I had started to understand that symptoms are just another way that information comes through. (May 28, 2005) She said: “I felt as if the spirits of Native American women were speaking to me. I felt as if I was getting this download of information.” Lara did not remember exactly where the idea of offering the blood to the Earth came from, she thought she might have heard about it from one of her teachers about Native American shamanism: “There is a lot of information through Native American women, but as they became Christianized and patriarchal a lot of information became hidden or twisted.” Dana’s concept of menstrual blood was also linked to what she described as an ancient tradition among indigenous women. And when I asked her why she considered Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood, she told me that Magdalene’s similarities with the red dakini of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition34 had helped her to establish this relation:35 The energy of the dakini represents the ever-changing flux of energy in movement. Often dakinis are naked, displaying their sex, and they drink from a cup that is made of a half of a skull . . . They are usually depicted with the color of blood and this means that blood has a lot to do with these deities . . . The dakini shows herself when the [meditation] practitioner is ready enough to access another level of consciousness . . . If [the practitioner] is a woman, a daka [male deity]shows itself, if it is a man then a dakini does. The dakini normally teaches you through means that are not rational, logical or conventional. So this story is a traditional one, telling that a great wise man is about to become enlightened and he meets somebody [a dakini] who takes him, takes his head, puts his mouth to her vagina and forces him to drink her menstrual blood . . . and when he drinks this the enlightenment comes. (March 3, 2006)

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Referring to paintings of Magdalene meditating or sitting beside a skull, Dana emphasized the similarities between the saint and the image she showed me of a dancing red dakini with a long necklace made of small skulls.36 “So I always found this figure of the dakini very fascinating and I find that Mary Magdalene has many things in common with the dakini: many, many things,” she said. “I mean, for me Mary Magdalene is a dakini. First of all, the skull: Mary Magdalene is often represented with a skull . . . the cup is also there [in Magdalene’s representations] . . . So the cup is a cup of blood and she holds the cup of blood that contains the blood of Christ at the moment of his death” (March 3, 2006). Dana also found many similarities between the legends of Magdalene’s stay at the Sainte-Baume and the spiritual practices of Tibetan Buddhist nuns: Then there is also the description of Magdalene’s life . . . When she lives in the cave, during these 33 years, legend has it that she does not eat nor drink. And among the female Tibetan practitioners [of Buddhism] . . . there was an important tradition. There were female pilgrims who traveled on their own and lived in caves or in cemeteries . . . Many of these women retired to live in caves and followed what they called “practices of the body of light.” These practices involve not eating and drinking for years. (March 3, 2006) This relationship to Tibetan Buddhism appeared even closer to Dana once she discovered that the spikenard oil used by the Gregorian Magdalene to anoint Jesus came from Tibet: “I mean . . . I am not saying that Mary Magdalene was Buddhist or anything like that. But I find that there are many energetic similarities if you consider the character, the archetype of the dakini. She initiates the man through sexuality or through [anointment], I mean, when Magdalene anoints Jesus, she is initiating him” (March 3, 2006). From Dana’s perspective, Magdalene was a teacher of sacred sexuality—that is, of techniques equivalent to or even coinciding with tantric techniques that allowed the attainment of spiritual elevation. Like the red dakini, Magdalene passed on teachings through gestures related to sexuality associated with blood, in her case the blood contained in a cup. For Dana this blood was menstrual blood and its ingestion could have healing power. Lara Owen emphasized the importance of menstrual blood in the Tantric tradition in her book: “In the Tantric tradition men became spiritually powerful by ingesting menstrual blood. Still today in the group rituals of the left-handed Tantric path, menstrual blood is taken along with red wine as a ritual drink.”37 Dana had not read Owen’s book, as it had not been translated into Spanish, but she had heard about another Tantric ritual: “I knew about this Tantric ritual during which partners have sexual intercourse while the woman is menstruating:

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the man ejaculates inside the woman and then the woman puts a cup [below her vagina], collects the mixture of sperm and blood, and both of them drink it” (March 3, 2006). We have seen that the pilgrims invoked divinities from a variety of traditions, holding all female divinities to be multiple expressions of the same Great Goddess. Sometimes divinities from several religious traditions were seen to express the same or a similar aspect of the Goddess. While Dana compared Magdalene with the red dakini, and emphasized her role as a female initiator for Jesus and for men in general, Roger conflated Magdalene and Aphrodite. Among the pilgrims there seemed to be an ongoing search for ways to create a transreligious, transnational, and transhistorical unity that could allow them to feel part of a spirituality that represented a rupture but also a certain continuity with previously established religions. This continuity was used to justify transcultural borrowing and give authority to their rituals.

Learning to Honor Menstruation During the Italian group’s first meeting at the Sainte-Baume, Celso had invited pilgrims to anoint each other’s feet, following the example of Mary Magdalene. He asked if any women in the group were having their period. Susanna, from Rome, said that she was, and added that she was suffering from severe menstrual pain. Susanna was an extroverted blond woman in her early forties who lived alone and worked as an executive secretary in an automobile factory in Rome. Like her friend Luciana, Susanna grew up in Rome and went to a Catholic school. At the university, where she studied German and English literature, Susanna turned away from Catholicism and with her brother joined a group of anthroposophy, the movement founded by Rudolph Steiner. From Massimo Scaligero,38 her first “master,” Susanna learned about the Gnostics and heard that Mary Magdalene had been the companion of Jesus. After she attended a weekend workshop about the tarot, she became well known among her friends for her ability to read the cards and gave advice to a widening circle of acquaintances. She met Celso at one of his workshops and agreed to be a cofounder of the cultural association. Her parents never opposed Susanna’s interests, as the family were characterized by special spiritual gifts. Her mother’s aunt, whom Susanna had never met, was known for her ability to read the cards, and Susanna’s mother had premonitory dreams that sometimes frightened her father. In her thirties Susanna had developed fibromas in her womb, and menstruation had become a painful experience. During the first evening gathering of the Italian group at the Sainte-Baume, Celso told Susanna to put some menstrual blood on a paper tissue and bring it the following day. The next morning Susanna had a high fever, which she attributed

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to the stress of the journey and the large amount of blood she was losing due to the fibromas. To lower the fever, Celso and Gianmichele gave her drops containing plant extracts (whose name Susanna could not subsequently remember). Then she slowly made her way up to the cave together with the other pilgrims. There, as we have seen, Celso instructed her to leave her menstrual blood, at a place of her choice inside the cave, as an “offering of her innermost female essence to Mother Earth on behalf of the whole group.” Susanna offered her blood beside the altar where the Holy Sacrament was conserved (see figure 3.6), and later told me that she was deeply moved while leaving this part of her: These are these strong emotions, you know. I had never done anything like that . . . I studied the Gnostics, and the gnosis considers menstruation as a high moment of femininity, of the woman. They do not see it at all as a time when the woman should be mistreated or put aside. You know all the common sayings, that menstruating women should not touch flowers because they will die etc., none of that is true. And in fact when [in the Scaligero group Susanna attended in her twenties] we made certain meditations, menstruating women did not need to practice a certain kind of respiration to raise the kundalini energy, because theirs was already high. So, remembering these things, it seemed normal to me to make this kind of gesture [offering the blood]. It would never have occurred to me to do it, but I was already prepared to have Celso tell me that I could offer a part of myself. Moreover, it is a beautiful part of me, it is absolutely not a dirty part. I was already prepared, because I knew that, as women, we are already elevated during this time. So it was a mixture of things. I cannot describe it to you, but I remember that I began to weep. This event touched me. (April 8, 2005) Susanna knew about the importance of the menstrual cycle from her study of what she identified as Gnosticism. She contrasted an alternative ideology, affirming the power and sacredness of the menstrual cycle, to prevalent ideas about the danger and pollution related to menstrual blood. In Italy there is a popular saying that plants will die if touched by a menstruating women. I myself remember an occasion in the 1990s when my flatmate in Brescia asked me to water the plants for her because she was having her period. In Susanna’s account there is an inversion of the popular beliefs about menstruation in Mediterranean Catholic countries: Menstruation and menstrual blood are not impure; on the contrary, they indicate a state of particular power in women. She also believed the blood offered can heal. Mary Magdalene pilgrims often referred to the Gnostics, as well as the Cathars and the Templars, as historical authority for their beliefs.

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Unlike Dana, who pointed out the importance of the menstrual cycle throughout the trip, Celso said little about it apart from the brief introduction to Susanna’s offering, which he described as “a ritual act to honor the female cycle and give thanks to Mother Earth.” When I asked Susanna if Celso had given her other details about the offering, Susanna answered: “Celso said that it [the blood] was something profoundly feminine . . . a part of oneself, a physical part that one could offer like this. Like a gift for Magdalene. This really struck me. And after it, [the offering] I felt better . . . They kept giving me remedies from little bottles but I did not need them any longer” (April 8, 2005). In Susanna’s mind, the offering was addressed to Magdalene as well as to Mother Earth. When I asked, neither she nor the other pilgrims made a connection between Mary Magdalene and menstrual blood, nor could they explain why the blood had been offered in the cave. Talking about the importance of menstrual blood, Celso put Susanna’s observations in a broader perspective. Celso’s explanations offer a good example of the way in which the leaders and the pilgrims constructed their theories by combining information from different areas of knowledge, a strategy mirroring that of the authors of the pilgrims’ spiritual-esoteric readings. In the Judeo-Christian culture and, above all, in the Hebrew culture, menstrual blood was [considered] impure. It was forbidden to touch a menstruating woman. And this idea of the menstrual period as a time of impurity later passed over also to Christian culture . . . In certain parts of Italy, when you had your period they even used to say “I have the disease” [c’ho la malattia]. These beliefs demonstrated a masculine avoidance of recognizing the power of menstrual blood by making it into something impure. Today [it is important] for a woman to recognize that during the menstrual period one is more sensitive. That same menstrual period that has been seen as the time of hysteria, you see? But hysteria is [the consequence of] the negation of this sensitivity and [the negation] of the great creativity that takes place during menstruation. The period also fosters the ability to see things from a different perspective, because everything changes on a biological level. Moreover the blood has an extraordinarily therapeutic power; it can cure many kinds of diseases. For women, the time of menstruation is also a time of great sexual arousal. Probably in ancient times menstrual blood was recognized as the blood that could consecrate, that had an initiatory power. There even is—I do not say that it is true, but it is interesting . . . the theory that in ancient times, for the Neolithic cultures, the consecrating oils were menstrual blood with sperm in it. From these oils then derived the sacred oils. But the part related to menstruation was obviously eliminated completely. (February 16, 2006)

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Celso’s theories were similar to those of Dana and Lara Owen; he also observed that it was important for men as well as for women to recognize the power of menstrual blood: “Recognizing this power of the feminine means the man freeing himself from the need to deny or imitate it.” When I asked him why he had chosen the cave of the Sainte-Baume for the offering, Celso answered: “Because it is the cave of the Magdalene. Menstrual blood gushes from the womb and the caves are representations of the womb. Magdalene is also a therapist; she is not only a teacher, she also is a woman that cures. For this reason, it is important to recover an essential instrument of the therapeutic abilities of the feminine. Moreover, [during the offering in the cave] the men [in the group] also honored this [feminine] principle” (February 16, 2006). For Celso, the offering was related to healing in several ways. It was intended to bring about a healing for both men and women, consisting in the acknowledgment of the power of the menstruating woman and reconciliation with it. At the same time it was to show women their capacity as healers and the healing capacity of the blood they spontaneously produced. Apart from holy water, there are two kinds of sacred liquid in Christianity: the blood of Christ and the sacred oil. Talking about menstrual blood, Celso referred to the oil and to the figure of the Magdalene as an anointer. When asked some time after the pilgrimage, few Italian pilgrims remembered the offering as particularly striking. Here is a clear example of what Simon Coleman calls “lateral participation.”39 The Italian pilgrims listened to Celso’s explanations and participated in the rituals inside the cave, but accepted only what they felt at ease with. The pilgrims from all three groups approached critically the theories and rituals proposed to them by their leaders and the sites they were led to visit. Their participation involved commitment but also “denial of commitment,”40 and as we will see in more detail below, when pilgrims felt uneasy about certain theories or features of a common ritual they reinterpreted them or simply dismissed them as minor issues. This partial commitment, I think, is not specific and exclusive to these pilgrims but rather, as Coleman argues, something that tends to be overlooked by anthropologists of religion. The pilgrims criticism and ambivalence is not or at least not only a consequence of the lack of tradition and the ad hoc nature of their rituals but also something they hold in common with other, more traditional religious groups and pilgrims.41

Creating a Sisterhood Based on Blood If Susanna decided to offer her blood near the Holy Sacrament (containing the essence of the Eucharistic ritual), Dana used symbols associated with the Eucharist for the collective menstrual offering of Goddess Wood. Dana drew a parallel

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between the offering of Christ’s blood and that of menstrual blood and like Celso related menstruation to peak sexual energy, referring to the Tantric tradition. On their first night at the Sainte-Baume, Dana’s pilgrims gathered in the meeting room to prepare their offering of menstrual blood to Mother Earth. This was to be the most important ritual of the pilgrimage, even providing its name (the Second Initiatory Pilgrimage of the Blood). Each woman’s “priestess kit” for this meeting included dried menstrual blood collected on cotton. Pilgrims formed a circle around an altar situated in the middle of the room: on a square cloth depicting the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe spread out on the floor, Dana and Clara put a chalice engraved with the Catalan Virgin of Montserrat and four burning candles on the four edges of the cloth (see figure 5.1). Just beside the cloth, there was the sahumador of the Conchero tradition and the smoke of the copal filled the room. Those who had forgotten dried menstrual blood and those who had reached menopause would use their arterial blood for the offering. Purificación, or Puri, the doctor of the group, would prick them, with the needles used by diabetics for glucose tests, to obtain drops. Together with Clara, Puri helped Dana to lead the trip. She had taken part in a Pilgrimage of the Blood two years before. Clara and Puri had participated in the counterculture of the late seventies in Spain and liked to talk about old times. In contrast to Clara, the Conchero lady, who

Figure 5.1 The Conchero altar at the beginning of the ceremony. Photo by Anna Fedele.

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often wore long skirts and colorful dresses, Puri always wore jeans and dark colors. An energetic woman in her fifties, Puri had dark hair and sparkling blue eyes. She was divorced and lived with her daughter in a town near Barcelona. After years working as a traditional doctor, she had opened a practice specializing in alternative healing techniques, such as homeopathy, and a particular laser technique. Puri explained to the assembly of women that the blood of all the women would be mixed together in a solution of water and alcohol inside the chalice, in this way creating a unified “mother tincture.” Following principles adapted from homeopathy, this tincture was diluted by putting a single drop in a thirty-milliliter bottle of water and alcohol. This dilution excluded any health risk, augmented the power of the original tincture and transformed the information contained in each woman’s blood, making it more subtle. In Puri’s terms, the information in the mother tincture, contained in the form of energy, was very dense, as it consisted of undiluted blood. The dilution allowed the extraction of the key information (stored in the blood’s DNA) leaving behind the more physical, dense and therefore lower energy. Puri explained that the more diluted the blood mixture, the more powerful its energy. As in homeopathy, a higher dilution of the same ingredient had a stronger effect than a lower dilution, because the curative effect does not depend on the physical presence of the element (which often cannot even be traced back), but on the information of the element transported and transmitted by alcohol or lactose. As in homeopathy, the diluted liquid would then be livened up (dinamizado) by shaking it. But in this case, the shaking would be done by everyone, serving to further infuse their information into the liquid. The creative mixture of homeopathic principles and DNA science proposed by Puri did not puzzle me alone. Pilgrims looked rather lost after her explanations and expressed doubts. As in other critical situations when the group became disoriented, Clara took control, and in her direct way brought things down to earth: Pilgrims would offer their blood to Mother Earth as women in ancient times did when they ploughed the fields, letting their menstrual outflow fall into the furrow they had created. Maybe, she added, menstrual blood, which women had once offered to Mother Earth, had been replaced by the bloodshed of today’s wars. Mother Earth was seen in this context as a divine being with a complex personality. Usually described as a caring and loving being, but now threatened by brutal human exploitation, she could be nurtured with menstrual blood, whose rich components served as a fertilizer. Nevertheless, Mother Earth had a destructive side, a necessary counterbalance to her creative and nurturing part, which emerged, for instance, during natural catastrophes. Menstrual blood was considered the only kind of blood that flowed without wounding, as opposed to bloodshed in war or natural disasters.

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Not all women felt comfortable with the idea that they should offer their blood in order to prevent further bloodshed. Carme, one of the younger pilgrims working as a teacher, commented to me about the offering of blood: I see it as an act of thanksgiving [un acto de gracias]. I mean . . . I eat fruit that comes from Her [Mother Earth] that She has plenty of and does not need. So, in the same way as I eat from Her, I offer Her something that comes out of me as a gift to Her, because there are few things we create ourselves, so it is something that comes out of me, something very intimate and very nice. I give it as an offering, as a present for Her . . . As for the matter about the shedding of blood onto the Earth during wars and massacres, it seems that in other cultures it was thought that you had to give a certain amount of blood to the Earth because otherwise She would ask for blood. You know, the Maya culture, human sacrifices . . . I never saw it in this way or thought that “Aahh, I have to give so that the Earth does not provoke an earthquake and bloodshed.” I saw it as a thanksgiving, an offering for Her. (March 11, 2005) Here is a good example of how pilgrims dealt with the leaders’ theories they did not feel at ease with. They promptly filtered them, keeping what they agreed with and discarding the rest.42 In the process, the pilgrims neutralized their ambivalence toward or rejection of certain ritual elements. Talking about the offering of menstrual blood Dana invited women not to throw their used sanitary napkins in the garbage, but to dissolve the blood in water and give it to plants or use it to mark the boundaries of their houses. Women could also create a homeopathic dilution of their blood, so that they could conserve it even after their menopause. The elements cited by the three leaders of Goddess Wood were quite different. Puri’s approach was focused on the DNA information contained in the blood, Clara’s on the need to feed Mother Earth, and Dana’s on the creation of a sisterhood and the transformation of women’s beliefs about their menstrual cycle. Archaic images of blood sacrifices appeared together with references to modern processes of dilution and the latest DNA findings.43 If it appeared important to the leaders to give the offering historical perspective by showing the temporal continuity of these kinds of rituals, it was important also to demonstrate its validity in terms of contemporary scientific research in biology and medicine. That evening, when I discovered what would happen to the dried menstrual blood I had brought along, I felt overwhelmed. When I first read about the offering of menstrual blood in the program, I had imagined that each woman would offer her blood individually to the Earth in a common ritual. I did not feel quite ready to become a blood sister to all the pilgrims, whom I barely knew after two days. There could be people among them whose ideas and choices I did not

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share, or who might have a contagious disease. To me, the idea of a blood sisterhood implied close friendship, mutual knowledge, and mutual reliance. Only that would induce people to create such an intimate alliance. My first gut reaction was that I did not want to mix my blood with theirs. Minutes later, my scientific side took over; I realized that the dilution in alcohol made the transmission of disease impossible, and that as on previous occasions I was probably the only one worried about my true motivations for participating in this ritual. The others seemed eager to begin. The women were sitting in the circle, in the place of their choice, not by age as in other rituals. While the whole group was singing, Dana was the first to offer her blood, thereby showing how to do it. Each woman in turn approached the altar, knelt before it and passed a small piece of the dried blood through the smoke of the copal, tracing Conchero symbols in the air: first a cross and then the symbol of the infinite. After purifying and blessing the blood with the copal, each woman moved toward the chalice on her knees and put the blood into the chalice, moved back to the sahumador on her knees, bounced forward to conclude the offering and give thanks, then stood up and went back to sit in the circle. Toward the end of the ritual it was the turn of the seven women who had not brought dried menstrual blood, among them Clara. Puri pricked their fingers one at a time and a small drop of blood appeared. Then they approached the altar, passed the bleeding finger through the copal, approached the chalice on their knees, and made a drop of blood fall into the chalice. The menstrual blood had to be cleaned three times: first through the copal, then by being dropped into alcohol, and finally by dilution. The idea of purification, and the elevation of the blood into a more subtle kind of energy, was similar to the idea of light energy and heavy energy from the Andean tradition. Dana’s notions about the elevation of the blood’s state in three phases paralleled the process of purification and elevation undergone by Celso’s pilgrims in the wood of the Sainte-Baume. Before entering the forest, they had been cleansed, thus transforming their personal heavy energy. Then, following the ritual pattern provided by Celso, they had ascended toward the cave, to release more heavy energy there through the stone they had carried with them. Finally they had released their attachments at Saint-Pilon chapel. Only then were they ready to be elevated toward the skies. Following Dana’s ritual scheme, her pilgrims’ elevation took place by means of the energy of their menstrual blood; like Celso’s pilgrims, they had found an alternative way to release their sins. Curiously, they used the menstrual blood they defined as sacred as the receptacle of their sins that needed to be purified and diluted in order to be ready for the offering. They criticized the Church for labeling menstrual blood as impure, but in some way they treated the blood as something requiring purification themselves. This paradox was perceived by

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Antònia, who, unlike me, had not worried about infection until she had heard Dana’s commentaries about the importance of diluting the blood mixture: I was struck by the fact that at some point it was explained to us that some kind of homeopathic dilution would be made out of this [blood mixture]. Because [before that] I had not thought at all that this could . . ., that if somebody had a physical problem this could end up harming the others . . . It seemed to me such a marvelous thing that I did not consider the possibility that it could [harm] . . . Of course, if somebody had hepatitis or AIDS, a major physical problem, then the act of sharing [the blood] could cause problems to the others . . . To me it seemed so much feminine essence that I could not have imagined something malignant in this, I mean, something harmful. (June 4, 2005) During the offering Dana organized for the first pilgrimage of the blood in 2002, she had made no dilution; women had used the mother tincture for the offering. This time, more precautions were taken, probably because Dana and the committed members of Goddess Wood knew that two of the women of the group had the HIV virus and had been on medication for years. I myself found out about this only after the pilgrimage, as the two women were treated like anybody else during it. Confronted with the sanitary risks linked to the handling of blood, especially fresh arterial blood extracted from women who had brought no dried menstrual blood, Dana needed to find a strategy that affirmed the sacrality of menstrual blood yet neutralized its potential to spread infection, which she was trying to eliminate from the pilgrims’ minds. When I later spoke to women about the ceremony, they, like Antònia, confirmed my impression that this blood mixing had not been as disquieting for them as it had been for me. One of the pilgrims told me, “it is only a mental thing; your mind leads you to think that the ritual is something very different [from everyday life], but if you think about all the things that can happen in hospitals [e.g., when patients get infected during blood transfusions], those are definitely worse” (August 23, 2004). At the time of the pilgrimage in summer 2004, Antònia had just entered menopause. Her last period had come in July 2003, and she had accepted this change and had not felt worried about the fact that she could not bring along her menstrual blood: “I found the idea of pricking myself [in order to extract blood] lovely. It appeared to me as an incredible act of communion. [It was] a total act of femininity, something really pertaining to our femininity. The pricking seemed good to me because it is really one’s own blood. It really seemed marvelous to me most of all because of the community, the feminine essence, the essence of the Mother, the contact with the Goddess” (June 4, 2005).

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Especially in this first ritual of Dana’s pilgrims at the Sainte-Baume, it is clear that ritual can create meaning that is fragmented and diverse. What seemed to be a powerful experience for Antònia made others ambivalent. Ruth and Estrella admitted that they did not fully commit and even felt incompetent because the ritual was too complicated. Again I do not think that this lack of commitment and feeling of incompetence44 is unique to crafted rituals. Maybe for the pilgrims it was easier to admit their disconnection because they knew the ritual was new and so they felt less obliged to fulfill the expectations than participants in an established religious tradition.

Lived Ritual As on other occasions, after the ritual preparation of the diluted blood Dana emphasized the power of the ritual acts by reading a passage by an international authority on Goddess spirituality: a message from Mary Magdalene channeled by Gillian MacBeth-Louthan in July 2004.45 This text included the most important elements mentioned by Dana and her associates: a secret order of the Magdalene, DNA encodings, and the need to activate ancient knowledge. After mixing their blood, Dana’s pilgrims were prepared to become part of a sisterhood of the Magdalene that included those from the previous pilgrimage and would include future pilgrims. They felt that they were continuing a tradition that had secretly initiated women through the centuries. Antònia, the Catalan teacher, mentioned this continuity of female initiation, saying enthusiastically she had felt as if she already knew these rituals. She compared the rituals to those she had read about in a Paulo Coelho novel about the initiation and apprenticeship of a young woman to witchcraft: “Every ritual surpassed what I had wanted to be able to experience while reading ‘Brida.’ And the marvelous thing was that the ritual in itself was nothing. I mean, it was not a ritual, it was not at all like my mental representation of a ritual. I always imagined rituals with a lot of paraphernalia and many things going on. But all the rituals were so simple and authentic . . . The real ritual was the one going on inside me” (June 4, 2005). During my fieldwork it was a challenge to learn how the pilgrims experienced the rituals. After the rituals they often told me that they were too moved and destabilized to talk about their feelings; when I asked them again later they often had only vague memories because the experience had been so intense that they could not describe the ritual sequence or their experiences in detail. Antònia was one of the few pilgrims who tried to explain to me her feelings during the rituals, because even after some time had passed she retained detailed memories: It formed part of my feminine essence and therefore it seemed normal to me to do something so beautiful, such an offering. This formed part of

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my goddess . . . I felt really committed and it was something normal for me, something that formed part of myself. I felt in some way as if I had already done this on other occasions during my life. But this was not true. It was not something artificial, something I had to remember how to do; I already knew how to do it .  .  . It was magic because it already formed part of me, I already knew this, but this was not true, because I had never done it before . . . In all the rituals, I felt very much a goddess because it [the ritual] was something mine. For that reason, the ritual was done in that particular way not because it had to be done that way but because it [felt right to do it that way] . . . Ahi, how hard it is to explain this kind of experience, my God! (June 4, 2005) This feeling described by Antònia of participating in rituals she already knew of in some way and of doing ritual gestures she felt belonged to her emerged from other pilgrims’ accounts as well. Even if they knew that the actual form of the rituals and energetic exercises they performed on the trip had been created ad hoc, pilgrims from all the three groups felt that they were inspired by previous, more ancient rituals and gestures they somehow felt familiar with. For some reason they knew how they had to behave and the rituals were not strange or artificial but rather formed a part of them. Felicia, the second oldest woman of the group, did not assume that she already knew what to do; on the contrary, she listened eagerly to all the explanations, needing to know how the ritual would take place in order to be able to accept and enjoy it. Paradoxically, knowing the exact ritual sequence allowed her to experience what she described as the surprise effect: The surprise effect of the ritual was there. They explained to us how we had to do it [the ritual] and for this reason I no longer felt responsible for anything. Because for many years I’ve felt responsible for everything going well and in that situation I did not even know how it was supposed to work [and so I did not feel responsible]. I did nothing else except participate and whenever I managed to do this then the atmosphere and the beauty conquered me. I can only describe this as beauty. There were different ways . . . of sharing the blood. There were those with the menstrual cotton, others who had to prick themselves .  .  . everybody participated in ways that were not totally uniform or standardized . . . and a group power emerges that is very strong. I find this lovely. Because on that day we scarcely knew each other, it was one of the first days. (June 17, 2005) Not at ease with words like “magic,” Felicia preferred to speak of “beauty,” a word Dana sometimes employed when needing a more acceptable term to

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describe the effect of rituals to skeptics. Like other women, Felicia spoke of a force, the power of the group that appeared with this ritual. By mixing their blood, women had mixed their energies and the information contained in their DNA codes. For the pilgrims the blood mixture was like the blood of a new body, that of a sisterhood they had created, which had come into being through the ritual. We have seen that Celso referred to the necessity of creating a energetic body of the group that would allow pilgrims to avoid problems like those occurred on the drive from Italy to France on the first day and also to take better advantage of the pilgrimage experience and its healing effects. For Celso this kind of collective body could be created without the use of blood, simply by allowing the pilgrims to become attuned to one another. He worked toward this attunement through simple things like having pilgrims share cars, food and rooms but also making them connect collectively to certain energy spots (like the dolmen at the Sainte-Baume) or having them share their experiences during the trip. Since the group already had a collective energy body, Celso described the menstrual offering as an offering of Susanna’s body to the Earth but also as an offering on behalf of the entire group. Catherine Bell analyzes contemporary ritual invention and refers among others to “new age rituals,” “feminist ritualization,”46 and rituals related to the “emergent men’s movement.” She observes that “today there is a growing social legitimacy for many types of ritual improvisation” and an “unprecedented visibility of the very dynamics of ritual invention.”47 For her, this freedom to experiment with ritual forms is related to a conceptualization of ritual “as a type of psychosocial mechanism unbound and undetermined by any one religious or ritual tradition.”48 Bell also argues that there is a “new paradigm of ritual” according to which ritual emerges as “a medium of expression” and “a special type of language.” It no longer serves as “gulf between the human and the divine”; it is “directed more inward than outward,” and it is “apt to define community and society in terms of the self rather than the self in terms of the community.”49 I did not find that emphasis on the self was particularly evident or salient in the Magdalene pilgrims’ discourses and ritual practices. Even if on some occasions leaders or pilgrims described the ritual and its efficacy using psychological terms and theories, their rituals were designed to communicate and interact with divine forces. There was also a deep desire for community50 and a trust that the healing of the individual body might bring about a healing of the social body. As Bell would put it, for the pilgrims the ritual served in part to define the self in terms of the community—here the immediate community of pilgrims, on the one hand, but also the more gender-equal community the pilgrims were seeking, as well as the transhistorical, transnational and transreligious spiritual community they felt a part of.

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The Blood Offering in the Wood The day after the ritual of blood-sisterhood, pilgrims visited the cave of the Sainte-Baume, talked together about the French Catholic mass and learned massage techniques to enhance their sexual energy. The next morning, the pilgrims were ready to climb up to the Saint-Pilon chapel. On the way up, Clara stopped not far from the dolmen, a few meters from the pair of trees used the day before to ask for a partner.51 She had found the appropriate place for the ritual offering to Mother Earth that the group would perform that evening: a natural ovalshaped hollow large enough to accommodate the circle of women and surrounded by trees. Clara and three other women prepared the place for the ritual, removing stones and branches. Antònia was one of the three helping to clear the place. While doing this, she saw images that anticipated the ritual gestures of the evening ceremony: I remember preparing the place and feeling a very good energy there . . . that moment was important for me because I really felt that I was preparing the place for something magical. I perceived vibrations in my body and felt very good. I did not know what would happen there, but I had the feeling of being in a chalice, in a womb. And I remember that when we went up [to the Saint-Pilon chapel], Clara commented that we would do the ritual in that place that same night and images of the chalice and the womb kept coming up. She [Clara] had not said anything [about the ritual of offering] and later, when we did the ritual, I thought: “What an intuition I had.” I felt great, really at ease and very free inside. (June 4, 2005) Antònia evoked the connection between women’s bodies and the body of Mother Earth. In her words the female womb was like a chalice, the Grail containing the blood, and the image evoked by the hollow, the womb of Mother Earth. Celso said that he had chosen to offer the menstrual blood in the cave of the Sainte-Baume because caves represented the uterus, and here again pilgrims seemed motivated by a desire to restore the blood to its original place, the womb, this time represented by the hollow in the earth. In the late afternoon, having spent the rest of the day on the top of the mount near Saint-Pilon chapel, the pilgrims came back to the hollow. Clara and Estrella prepared an altar in the middle of the hollow while the others waited a few meters away. Then women entered according to their ages, the oldest first. Each woman passed through the two trees (those previously used to ask for a partner) that marked the entrance to the ritual area. Each woman was received some meters further on by Clara, who cleansed her energy field with the copal smoke from her sahumador and whispered some words in her ear. Then the woman

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went to the hollow and offered what she had brought to the altar. Before her offering, she sometimes whispered something and then made Conchero signs in the air, as on the day before. Finally, each woman sat down on the rim of the hollow beside her immediate elder. As the women waited their turn, they dressed up by putting flowers or leaves in their hair, then slipped on colorful skirts and put on the ritual red girdles they had crocheted for themselves on the trip. Some gathered branches, stones or other things from the wood to offer. Shoes and backpacks were to be left outside the ritual area. Every woman carried with her a small plastic container with earth from the wood, to which a drop of the blood mixture was to be added, creating a precious physical reminder of this ritual offering. Their faces lit by the four candles of the altar, the older women could be seen sitting side by side waiting for the circle to be completed. As I was one of the youngest present, I had to wait nearly an hour for my turn. From outside the ritual area, I could make out Clara’s cleansing gestures and wondered what would happen if some of the Dominicans or a late pilgrim came down the path. Those around me were conversing in low voices, sometimes hushed by Dana who was to complete the circle and who was supervising the timing of entry. I asked Puri about the site they had chosen, and she proudly explained that it was already prepared for this ceremony when they found it, and that surely it had already been used for ceremonies of this kind before. When it was my turn to enter, darkness had fallen and the wood had become a place of mystery, filled with noises and sudden bird cries. Before passing through the two trees, Dana explained that I should touch both of them, asking for permission to enter the circle. Feeling the rough bark with my palms, I sensed I was entering a new space. It was no longer the wood I had known until then, but instead a landscape filled with unknown beings, signs and meanings. Following the path, I moved on and then waited my turn for the cleansing. When Clara called me, she made me stand in front of her, invoked the power of the copal, and then made me close my eyes. Surrounded by the intense smell of copal, my senses sharpened and I felt slightly entranced. Clara whispered that I should always remember the power of copal, and that I would travel and live in many countries and leave visible footprints in all of them. When I opened my eyes, I found it hard to recover my balance and eventually made my way to the altar. Feeling watched by what was by now an almost complete circle of women, I offered some branches. As I had not seen how the other women had done it, and since Dana had not specified how to make the offering, I decided to trace some Conchero symbols in the air before putting the branches on the altar. The altar in the center of the hollow consisted of the chalice of the Virgin of Montserrat and a big white candle with a red X on it, which reminded women of the symbol of the DNA. Around them there were yew branches and all the other leaves and branches offered by the women. I sat down beside Ruth, a

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Catalan art-therapist slightly older than I, and waited for the other three younger women. When they arrived each chose to offer the branches in a different way. Pilgrims stared at the central altar, the dim candlelight making them resemble hieratic figures, the dark wood around them suggesting images from novels and films about secret orders and ancient rituals. As one of the eldest pilgrims, Antònia had entered the sacred space shortly after sunset and was able to watch how the other women arrived, put their offering at the altar and sat down on the rim of the hollow: Clara cleansed us, she passed the sahumador and we sat down in the circle, according to our ages. How moving it was! When Clara cleansed me I felt as if she was taking away from me something of amazing dimensions . . . and I really saw her as a great priestess in that moment. I saw her, but I did not see her as she was dressed, I felt her as the priestess she was and felt incredibly grateful for this act of initiation, for that burden she took from me in that moment. I had no awareness of carrying that burden up until that moment. Only when I let it go did I realize that it had been a burden for me. But I do not know what I left there . . . and then I went to sit down, the following women were initiated, and the circle gradually became complete. I remember that I felt overwhelmed by feelings and by an inner happiness. (June 4, 2005) When Dana finally arrived, she took the chalice and invoked the seven directions by raising each time the chalice and calling out their names. Turning toward the four cardinal points she invoked the four winds, then in front of the altar she invoked the Center, Father Sky, and Mother Earth. Then she sat between the eldest and the youngest pilgrim, thus the only participant not seated according to the age-based hierarchy in the circle. Lit only by candlelight, the women looked much older than they were. With serious faces they listened to Dana speak of the ritual’s importance. She explained that the chalice contained Provençal wine and some drops of the blood dilution, and that each woman would drink from it and say something to the circle. By saying “Peristarán,” Dana signaled that she had finished speaking, then she stood up and took the chalice in both hands. She invited the eldest woman to approach, kissed the base of the chalice “as the Concheros did,” gave it to her and returned to her place. The woman, in her early sixties, received the chalice, kissed it and invoked the seven directions raising the chalice each time facing the altar, that is, without turning when invoking each direction. She then drank from the chalice and spoke, explaining how honored she felt to open this ceremony and to be so important and valued because of her age. In normal society things were not like this, and she tended to be ignored because of her age. Then she said, “Peristarán,” invited the following woman to approach, kissed the

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chalice and passed it on. Every woman received and kissed the chalice, invoked the seven directions, drank and then spoke. Sometimes the sequence of the last two actions was reversed and the woman spoke first and then drank from the chalice; sometimes the woman turned toward the four cardinal points when invoking, sometimes not. The place the women stood while invoking and drinking varied over time. Some women spoke for several minutes; others just said a few sentences. All seemed deeply moved when addressing their new blood sisters. Most of them gave thanks to Dana, Clara, and Puri and some also thanked the spirits of the wood and Mary Magdalene. They expressed feelings of plenitude and pride at being part of such a ritual and such a powerful female community. When it was Clara’s turn, she explained that the women here were doing rituals in their own way, but with the same intention as in more ancient rituals. From time to time, the cup was refilled with wine. After about an hour it was my turn. When Ruth said, “Peristarán” and looked at me, I entered the circle and stood in front of her. She passed me the chalice but immediately took it back, whispering to me that she had not drunk yet. She drank rapidly, kissed the chalice, and gave it to me. Slightly confused by Ruth’s mistake, I performed the invocation of the seven directions as best as I could and drank from the chalice. Then I gave thanks to the leaders and to the group for their warm welcome and their openness in sharing their ideas and feelings with me. Finally I said, “Peristarán,” kissed the cup, and gave it to the next pilgrim. Once the youngest pilgrim had finished, Dana entered the circle and received the chalice. She drank and then explained that they would finish the ceremony by passing the chalice around the circle. When drinking from it, each woman should toast and invoke something for herself or the entire group. Dana began by invoking the healing of the women’s relationships to their mothers. When the wine was finished and everybody had drunk from it again, the ritual was declared to be over. The women put out the candle and left the ritual area. Gathering their things, they slowly made their way through the wood with torches and candles. Antònia told me about this ritual: When the time came [for each women to descend to the centre of the hollow and] to make the personal offering I was slightly nervous. I saw the other women going towards the center before me and began to wonder whether I would be able to do the ritual . . . all the women before me went down and made the offering to the north, the south and so on with the chalice. And in that moment I began to worry that I would not be able to do what I was supposed to do. And I was going through a bad moment, as if I were disconnected from that internal explosion I had felt before . . . But in the very moment I went down all my anxiety disappeared . . . Again I had the feeling that I had had the night before, that I knew exactly what I had to do and

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to say. I had no doubts; this means, I again felt like the Goddess. And so I was so moved, so connected and I felt so much energy and so much love and connection, with the Mother, with the Goddess. I really do not know what I did or what I said, I remember that at some point I was weeping with emotion . . . I do not know what I did or said, it was as if it came from my interior, from my center, from my goddess. And it was great! (June 4, 2005) According to Antònia, at first she felt incompetent and only after a while could she enjoy the ritual. Other pilgrims as well criticized the complexity of this ritual and said how hard it was to engage with it fully. They had received only general explanations about how to do the ritual, and several told me that they did not know how they were supposed to behave. When I shared my doubts with Sol, the squatter, she told me: “It’s not important, the seed remains,” explaining that the exact ritual gestures were not so relevant and that the effects of the ritual would act as a seed that would slowly start to germinate. By the time the group reached the hostel it was past midnight. As the hungry pilgrims cooked and ate in the common kitchen, they excitedly recounted their feelings and experiences during the ritual. Despite the difficulties and perplexities a new sense of communion seemed to have formed among them, and they kept repeating: “Now we are blood sisters.” After dinner Dana invited pilgrims to a short gathering in the common room before going to sleep. One of the pilgrims who had come with her dog entered the room, proudly explaining us that her dog had just eaten a used tampon found in the bathroom: “He too wanted to be part of the ritual of sharing the menstrual blood!” The dog’s behavior was interpreted as a further proof of the power of the ritual. The women had previously referred to the dog, which had a name normally only used for people, as the only male of the group and treated him as the pilgrimage mascot.

Doubt-Solving, Different Approaches to the Collective Ritual That evening I wondered at which moment in the ritual the blood was supposed to have been offered to the Earth. Women had drunk from the chalice after invoking the seven directions (among them Mother Earth), but at no time had I actually seen somebody spill any of the liquid of the chalice onto the earth. When Dana invited women to offer their blood to Mother Earth each month, she had always told them to do it physically, soaking the napkins in water and watering the earth with the liquid. This time the offering seemed to have been symbolic. The other women had not thought about it. Some said that perhaps Clara

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had spilt some of the liquid onto the earth before the women entered the circle. When I asked Dana, she told me that the actual offering had taken place when each woman had approached the altar, invoked the seven directions, and drunk from the chalice. I soon discovered that there were as many versions of the exact ritual sequence as there were pilgrims. Again in this case what mattered for the pilgrims were not the precise ritual gestures or the enunciation of a precise script but the symbols (chalice, circle of women, candle, etc.), the symbolic actions (drinking from the cup, speaking to the group, standing at the center of the circle, etc.), and the effects.52 Far from taking for granted the ritual’s effectiveness, the pilgrims approached the ritualization process critically, comparing its supposed effects with their energy perceptions during and after the offering. Not all pilgrims had felt as comfortable as Antònia during the offering. As a committed group member, Felicia felt particularly disappointed by her failure to become attuned to the ritual. As we have already seen, Felicia tended to worry about the way the rituals were performed. As one of the eldest and most committed members of the Goddess Wood, she felt responsible for the well being of the pilgrims and the correct performance of the ritual sequence; this gave her a totally different perspective. Since she was the second pilgrim to enter the circle, she soon realized that most pilgrims were cold, sitting barefoot on the cold earth. Most of them were not used to sitting still for so long without being able to lean on something. Unlike during the evening before in the meeting room, Felicia did not manage to enjoy the offering in the wood because she remained focused on the external features of the ritual. For Felicia the script of the ritual had not been respected, and she seemed unable to trust that it would work anyway: I feel this [that the women felt cold and uncomfortable] and so I am stuck on the discomfort of the people of the group and it is difficult for me to detach from that. Moreover, if there is a ritual gesture I like it to be done as precisely as possible, but we had to invoke the seven directions and there were people who did it well and others who seemed to me not to do it properly and this also distracted me. And I suffered. It was not so much because of whether the invocation was done properly or not, but rather that if you do something feeling comfortable there is much more beauty in it, and for the circle it is better to see beautiful gestures than to see that the person who is doing it [the gesture of invoking] is suffering because she does not know whether she is supposed to do it this way or that. (June 17, 2005) Like Antònia and Felicia, Ruth,53 sitting next to me in the age-ordered circle of the offering, mentioned the risk of being distracted from the ritual by doubts and questions. When I asked Ruth to tell about her pilgrimage experience, she

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answered that she was probably not the right person to talk to because she did not feel any particular connection with Mary Magdalene. She had chosen to join the pilgrimage to see what it was and to spend some time with her friend Carme, and was not following a deeper spiritual calling. I considered Ruth’s point of view particularly interesting because she represented exactly the kind of borderline pilgrim who joined the trip out of curiosity without great expectations or aims. From the beginning of the pilgrimage Ruth felt that if she took the ritual and its implications too literally she would not benefit from it. Like other pilgrims in similar situations, she decided not to give too much importance to Dana’s and Puri’s explanations and to concentrate on a more abstract, symbolic level. She concluded that, as Clara had said, the most important thing was that women were celebrating a ritual together. Every time I saw that little bottle [with the blood dilution] I said to myself “what are we doing?” [She laughs]. I don’t know, now I remember it [the ritual of offering in the wood] and I remember the image and the sound of the leaves. Sensations come to me, the smell of the wood, the color of the fire [candlelight], the wood and that moment. Feelings about the place where we sat down, the fear I felt. Fear because of everything, not only because we were in the woods at night, but because . . . it was like . . . it was very witch-like, lots of witchcraft [muy de brujas, muy brujería]. Like moving into another epoch with a certain fear . . . And the offering, I did not get that either . . . offering my own blood, I asked myself: “How can my blood, as small as it is [without importance] in something as big as that.” But in reality it [making the offering] was like giving thanks for the experience we were having. If you saw it on that level [of giving thanks], then it could make some kind of sense, but if you considered it on a normal level you got lost and began to think “what am I doing and what is happening?” . . . Something we spoke about a lot during this trip was precisely the fact that we were being together without attacking each other and without being competitive. Instead we were helping each other, we joined our forces, knowledge and different ways of being. Because we were a variety of incredible women, to me this was very encouraging. There was no structure, we were given a lot of freedom. Mixing the blood was part of all this on a symbolic level. I did not perceive it as something as “Wow, we are uniting the blood!” It was, something very symbolic . . . moreover, menstruation is the part that unites you as a woman [with other women]. (May 16, 2005) Ruth’s anxiety over the witch-like atmosphere reminded me of Luciana’s ancient fear of being labeled and judged as a witch. Ruth’s strategies for dealing

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with doubts and her ambivalence toward the blood rituals offer another example of “lateral participation.”54 We can see how one of the features that allowed the pilgrims to overcome their doubts was the emphasis on building community. Ruth could not believe that her own blood could be important in such a vast context and preferred to focus, as Felicia had done, on the importance of the group. She observed that women were doing witch-like things as a group, instead of competing as individuals. Her relief at finding a supportive community atmosphere was stressed by several of Dana’s pilgrims when they spoke holding the chalice. They thanked the other women and described the relief they had felt when they realized they did not need to be better than the others and could instead rely on the others’ help. Especially women in Dana’s group referred to female competition as ordinary, something they experienced in their everyday life; they considered Western women’s constant competition as one of the effects of patriarchal domination. Sali, who had participated in the first pilgrimage, also emphasized the importance of an alliance among women: But the most important thing was the “insight” [sic, in English] that I took away with me [after the offering]. [I realized that] what in reality appears to be the most important thing is a kind of fabric [tejido] that holds everything together, [consisting of] the relationships women have with each other. The design on that fabric represents your relationships with men, your husband, your work and what you do, but what really sustains life, what gives life to it, are the relationships among women. It is as if this [the relationship among women] is the reason, and the rest is just an anecdote. (September 21, 2005) When Sali was among women, and particularly with her best friends and her sisters from Goddess Wood, she felt that she could finally relax and rely on the help of others. Sali’s image of a female fabric that sustained life reminded me of Estrella’s image of the matrix as the center of femininity, the source of menstrual blood and of life that needed to be protected.55 In contrast with Celso, who emphasized the importance that the discovering and the recognition of the power of menstrual blood might have for men, and Roger, who had run workshops on menstruation with his former wife, Dana and her pilgrims made no mention of sharing their findings about the menstrual cycle with their partners or other men. Before analyzing in detail the rituals that Dana’s pilgrims celebrated at the Sainte-Baume and comparing them with other menstrual rituals, I will describe an individual menstrual offering I celebrated together with one of the committed members of Goddess Wood that allows us to understand better the collective rituals described so far.

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Estrella’s Personal Menstrual Ritual Offering The relationship between Jesus’s blood as a sacrifice for humanity and menstrual blood appeared to be crucial for the conceptualization and creation of rituals of menstrual offerings. Describing her findings and feelings during the period of offering her menstrual blood to the Earth, Lara Owen commented: “It was a mixture of things, it was a sacrament; it was recognizing that my blood was fertilizing the earth, that it was useful, that my blood had a use, a purpose, that it wasn’t just something to flush down the toilet, rich in minerals; it was a connection to the earth; it was also a sacrament, I was working with the idea of the blood of Jesus turning into wine and the idea that the original blood was sacrificial blood from animals, but maybe before it was menstrual blood” (May 28, 2005). This link with Jesus’s blood offering celebrated during the Eucharist emerged also in the individual offering of the pilgrim most committed to this kind of offering, Estrella. This Catalan woman raised in a conservative Catholic and machista family had been offering her blood each month for the past two years, creating beautiful altars decorated with fruit and flowers, which she then photographed and used for her art work. Like Ruth and Felicia, Estrella felt distracted by the external features of the common ritual of offering. While Estrella occasionally offered her blood with friends, she normally did it on her own. The month after the pilgrimage she made the offering with two of the younger pilgrims. In November 2004, it was my turn to learn from her how to make an individual offering. One cold day, Estrella led me into a wood just outside Barcelona. While looking for the appropriate place for our common ritual, Estrella explained that she had been offering her menstrual blood since 2000, following the invitation of the abuela Margarita, an elder Mexican woman shaman who visited Barcelona annually to hold workshops for women and sweat lodges open to both men and women. During her workshops, the abuela asked women not to put their blood in the trash because it would be like throwing away their personal power. Instead, the menstrual blood should be offered to Mother Earth, as she claimed Mexican indigenous women had done.56 The day before our meeting I had followed Estrella’s instructions, gathering my menstrual blood in a bowl by wringing my sanitary napkin soaked in water and keeping the blood and water mixture in the refrigerator. I had also selected some fruit to offer to the Earth. Once we found the place she considered appropriate, Estrella created a circle of protection to chase away evil spirits and create a safe environment by standing in the middle of an imaginary circle and tracing a clockwise circle beginning from the east, saying: “God, in thy name I trace this circle.” Then she summoned the seven directions, reading from a paper with instructions from Dana.57 Once the circle was created, we sat down inside it and each of us dug a hole in the earth, creating the altar for our offering. Estrella then

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opened a red bag holding a red glass, a red bottle, and several crystals. She had also brought apples, oranges, a pomegranate, and some walnuts and chestnuts. The decoration of the altar holes began: Each of us lit a candle and an incense stick at the top of our altar hole. I had instinctively dug a round hole, while Estrella had given hers the ovoid shape of a vagina. She put a red silk shawl and several crystals around its rim. Near the candle, she placed the tarot card of the Star, which she associated with Mary Magdalene. It showed a woman pouring water from two jugs, which according to Estrella symbolized the two ovaries. She gave me the card with the icon of Mary Magdalene holding a red egg in her hand, symbolizing women’s ovaries and the process of menstruation. Also on Estrella’s altar were her magic wand and a picture of Amma, a living Indian saint who is believed to incarnate the Divine Mother. After each of us drew a card from a set depicting Native American sacred animals, we put it on our altars. The chosen animal would wisely suggest appropriate changes and teachings during the period up to the next menstruation. Following Estrella’s example, I decorated the inside of the hole with the fruit and the other food I had brought with me (see figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 A menstrual altar made by the author following Estrella’s indications at the end of the offering, with a Native American card of a butterfly, upper right, and the Magdalene card, upper left. Photo by Anna Fedele.

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Everything was then ready for the offering. Estrella sang several ritual chants invoking the Virgin Mary, the four elements, and Mother Earth. She then poured her blood from the red bottle into the red glass, lifted it briefly, asked Mother Earth to accept the blood and let it sink down onto the earth’s center, flowing into the hole filled with fruit. She repeated this procedure several times until the bottle was empty, and I followed her example. While the hole was filled with the liquid that filtered down slowly, Estrella added honey and soaked some of her crystals in this mixture. When the liquid had been absorbed, Estrella suggested that we lie down on Mother Earth so that She could take away from us all negative energy. After some time spent lying on the ground, Estrella offered some tobacco to the Earth, inviting Her again to accept the blood, and then asked for the resolution of psychological and physical problems, inviting me to do the same. After completing the offering, we covered the altars with earth, and once Estrella had said goodbye to the spirits of the seven directions and closed the protection circle, we left.

Sacralizing Menstrual Blood, a Revolution of the Christian World Both Dana and Estrella readily admitted that they had invented their collective and individual rituals of offering. Dana also told me that she did not fully believe abuela Margarita who told Estrella that Mexican indigenous women used to make similar offerings. Dana considered contemporary indigenous women in Latin America to be very prudish about sexuality and their cycle and thought that even if they might have made menstrual offerings in the past they probably did so no longer. There is an inversion of Christian symbols and ritual actions in Estrella’s offering and in the collective ritual in the wood of the Sainte-Baume, particularly of those associated with the Eucharist. This ritual inversion corresponded to Estrella and others’ desire to invert the world order created by the patriarchal Christian belief system. Even when trying to struggle free from Christian limitations and a bias they experienced as world- and female-denying, these women chose symbols and actions they had interiorized growing up in a world imbued with Christian values. The offering of the blood created by Estrella represented this inversion literally. An altar was dug in the earth, and Estrella told me that “the altar has to be beautiful, because the beauty brings healing power with it.” What Estrella defined as the altar was not something that rose up from the earth, such as a table or a rock (allowing interaction with forces ideally supposedly above), but a hole in the ground, created to communicate and exchange energy and healing with Mother Earth, situated below. Incense and candles were used as in Christian

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churches, but the main venerated figures were Mary Magdalene and Amma, the incarnation of the Divine Mother. Blood was offered in a cup together with food—that is, the fruit of the land according to the season of the year. What Estrella offered was not red wine, symbolizing Christ’s male blood from a wound caused by men and foretelling imminent death, but real female blood flowing out spontaneously from a woman’s womb and mixed with water. It symbolized Mary Magdalene, guardian of menstrual blood, Jesus’s lover and female counterpart, and testified to the woman’s potential to give birth in the future. As God’s bliss descended from the sky down to its worshippers, who celebrated Eucharist and communed with Jesus, Mother Earth, who received the offering, sent up her healing power and later absorbed the negative energy. Talking about the blood offering, Estrella said: “When you offer your blood to the Earth, it is as if you lower your blood inside a vessel down to the earth. I mean, you lower it to the well to draw some water from it, but at the same time you leave your water. Then you pull up the container again and the energy is so powerful because it is the energy from Mother Earth. She makes the energy rise up to the heart and there you meet Mary Magdalene” (September 18, 2005). Like the pilgrims of the other groups, Estrella and the other women of the Goddess Wood held that social change could begin only in the individual and that if more and more women healed their relations with their menstrual cycle and experienced this physical process as something sacred, there might be an important tipping point. By offering their blood to the Earth, these women wanted to reestablish an ancient alliance with Mother Earth that strengthened them in their power as women and their self-esteem. They also celebrated menarche and menopause through rites of passage that accompanied the Goddess Wood’s members through these processes of deep personal change.58 According to Françoise Héritier’s analysis of male and female in traditional societies,59 the female menstrual blood is considered uncontrollable: it flows out without the woman being able to prevent it from doing do. When men’s blood flows, it is mostly provoked by an inflicted wound, and the blood flow can be controlled; that is, it can be provoked and later stopped. Héritier shows how, since Aristotle,60 this biological fact has been culturally interpreted as a sign of the inferiority of women, who cannot master their bodies, and so used to justify women’s social oppression. As opposed to men, who can decide to make blood flow while hunting or fighting their enemies, women of fertile age are experience periodical bleeding which is outside their control.61 The women of the Goddess Wood viewed this spontaneous flow of blood as a sign of women’s superiority; they could bleed without suffering, without having to be wounded. Women can decide to offer their blood for the sake of humanity, as Christ’s blood sacrifice had redeemed humanity from the original sin. This offering ideally led to the disappearance of human sacrifice in war, a period of peace characterized by the respect and honor attributed to matter and the Earth,

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to body and sexuality and the consequent equality of women to men. The women of the Goddess Wood did not want to get back to a matriarchal society, but to a new, nonhierarchical society based on the equality of men and women. Even though the Goddess Wood’s pantheon consisted of gods and goddesses from other religions (like the Chinese goddess Kuan Yin or the Indian god Shiva), those most often named and invoked were the Christian ones they found familiar and reassuring. The strong influence of Christianity emerged as well at the moment of ritual crafting, when women created rituals to celebrate collective or personal events, as with Estrella’s offering of menstrual blood. Frustrated by the secondary role assigned to women in the Catholic Church and by the rigid and disempowering upbringing some of them had received as women in conservative Catholic families, they gradually learned from Dana’s guidance, and from texts linked to feminist spirituality, to see Christian figures in a new light. These women found a new way to access a Catholic pantheon, that, at least in Mediterranean Europe, consisted of saints and different avatars of the Virgin and Christ venerated in distinctive forms and special places (e.g., the Virgin of Saliente in Andalusia, the Christ of Medinaceli in Madrid, the Virgin of Montserrat in Catalonia). Mary Magdalene, a controversial saint from the beginnings of Christianity, played an important role for these pilgrims, acting as an ambiguous connection between the Christian and Pagan worlds.62 Through a feminist reading of Jesus’s message, Dana and the other members of the Goddess Wood managed to blend two apparently opposed religious traditions they carried within themselves and to harmonize the attraction they felt toward the well-known Christian figures and rituals and the deep desire to be fully accepted as independent flesh and blood women. Menstrual blood represented a symbolically and physically powerful departure point for the transformation of a male-dominated world they sought to change. By replacing the blood of Christ offered by a male priest during Eucharist with their own menstrual blood, which they offered themselves as priestesses, these women autonomously established the importance of their wombs and bodies and their right to dialogue with the divine. The pilgrimage and its rituals represented an effort “to reformulate the constitution of the everyday word” and “deal with conflicts inadequately addressed in prevailing ideologies and institutions.”63 Like in the case of the Zionist cult in South Africa described by Jean Comaroff, the rituals were an “outcome of a process of simultaneous reproduction and transformation” and the “resulting bricolage” presses “new associations” and reproduces “conventional meaning.”64 In the rituals and especially in the menstrual ones analyzed here the pilgrims contested certain meanings related to menstruation they perceived as inherent to the patriarchal system of the Church but at the same time ended up reproducing certain ritual structures inherent in Christianity and embracing certain implicit assumptions of the social order they were contesting.

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Christ’s Blood and Menstrual Blood According to Catholicism, when the faithful participate in the Eucharist they consume the blood and flesh of Jesus, that is present thanks to the miracle of transubstantiation; by offering his blood for mankind, Christ made up for the original sin. These women with Catholic backgrounds wanted to find a way to show that menstruation was not a curse caused by the first woman’s sin, but a blessing both for women and men. They therefore enacted a ritual equivalent to that of the Eucharist, but without the intervention of a male divinity. Embodying this change of meaning during their ritual they enacted a different, desired world order that was in contrast with the existing one. They asserted that menstrual blood is sacred, like the most sacred of all blood in Christian terms, that of Jesus. As Vanessa Rousseau points out in her study about theories and practices related to blood in Western Christianity,65 in Christian terms the blood coming out of the body because of menstrual periods or because of wounds was identified with the Latin word cruor. Sanguis was the blood circulating through, and contained inside, the body, bringing life and force to it. The cruor, however, was considered impure, a sign of the body’s corruptibility and mortality, symbolizing life leaving the body. Christ’s blood is directly opposed to all other human blood, and goes beyond the opposition of pure and impure. It implies impurity and purity, fall and redemption.66 The pilgrims considered menstrual blood to have special status, being the only blood that flows spontaneously out of the human body, without wounding or harm. It made Jesus’s sacrifice and any further shedding of blood unnecessary. Dana’s pilgrims were not the only ones to associate menstrual blood with that of Jesus. Analyzing the belief system of the Christian medieval believers, Caroline Walker Bynum observes that they might “see the blood Christ shed in the circumcision and on the cross as analogous to menstrual blood or to breast milk” because “all human exudings—menstruation, sweating, lactation, emission of semen and so on—were seen as bleedings; and all bleedings—lactation, menstruation, nosebleeds, hemorrhoid bleeding and so on—were taken to be analogous . . . Medieval writers, for example, urged men to apply leeches to their ankles when they failed to ‘menstruate.’”67 When I pointed out to Dana the similarity between the Eucharist and the way she performed the offering of menstrual blood to the Earth, she was surprised. She told me she had never thought about it, but agreed that there were many similarities. What struck me was that Estrella had developed her ritual of offering since 2000 independently from that of Dana, and yet there were many similarities between them. Dana had never formally been a Catholic, but had a good relationship with Christianity and Catholic churches and statues. Estrella, on the contrary, rejected her Catholic upbringing, criticized her parents’ religion, and distrusted members of the Catholic church. Catholic rituals provoked

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her disgust and anger. Nevertheless, both Dana’s and Estrella’s rituals involved the invocation of certain kind of spirits, the creation of an altar and the offering of the blood in a chalice. Dana’s ritual emphasized the aspect of sharing the blood, having all the pilgrims drinking from the chalice and thereby reinforcing a sense of sisterhood among themselves and with Mother Earth. Estrella’s ritual was centered upon her communion with Mother Earth and the healing forces received form her. Estrella did not drink from her blood during the offering, but she had drunk it for several months in form of a homeopathic dilution in the past, in order to obtain force and healing. Both the Goddess Wood common offering and Estrella’s individual offering were placed in a hole in the ground but whereas Estrella dug the hole herself, Clara chose a place where there already was a hollow. At the end of the ritual Estrella covered the altar hole with earth, whereas Clara and some other pilgrims retrieved the chalice and the candle and left the other natural elements offered by pilgrims uncovered in the hollow. The image of Mary Magdalene that Estrella integrated into her ritual offering after the pilgrimage, the text Dana added to the image, and the legend related to it offer further elements to understand both menstrual offerings. Dana’s pilgrims received this card at the end of the trip as a sort of certificate that they had participated in it.68 This icon apparently belongs to the church dedicated to Mary Magdalene inside the Orthodox convent in the garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem69 and the legend recounted by Dana was probably drawn from the Jungian analyst Nancy Qualls-Corbett’s book The Sacred Prostitute. According to the legend that Qualls-Corbett claims to have heard from the nuns of the convent,70 shortly after Mary Magdalene saw the resurrected Christ, she met Pontius Pilate. She told him about the resurrection but he did not believe her, and asked for proof. Mary Magdalene grasped an egg and it turned red, thereby demonstrating the truth of her words. According to Dana, this legend explained one of the reasons why eggs were given on Easter day to celebrate the resurrection. This legend further confirmed Magdalene’s relation with the menstrual cycle because the egg turning red represented the process of the nonfertilized ovum being absorbed into menstrual blood. It also represented the death of the egg and its resurrection as a new ovulation cycle began for the woman, offering a further parallel between menstruation and Christ’s sacrifice and blood.

Blood of Life and Death In the introduction to the 1988 collection of essays Blood Magic; The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb called for a study of menstrual customs and beliefs in their cultural context. They showed how previous analyses “have great predictability, for again and again they center on the

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concepts of taboo (supernaturally sanctioned law) and pollution (symbolic contamination),”71 and tended to consider menstrual taboos’ as indicators of female subordination.72 Moreover, psychoanalytic studies like those of Bettelheim,73 cited above, described women as passive vessels of male theories derived from fear and envy, and these had influenced anthropologists. The authors argue that menstrual taboos tend to be ambiguous and multivalent and could evoke concepts of holy as well as forbidden.74 They observe that “many menstrual taboos, rather than protecting society from a universally ascribed feminine evil, explicitly protect the perceived creative spirituality of menstruating women from the influence of others in a more neutral state, as well as protecting the latter in turn from the potent, positive spiritual force ascribed to such women.”75 Mary Magdalene pilgrims from Dana’s group believed menstrual practices and the use of menstrual huts to be similar to that described to Thomas Buckley by his Yurok informant. Buckley’s article proved particularly inspiring to Lara Owen,76 and indirectly to Dana’s pilgrims77 as well. Influenced by Martha McClintock’s article78 about menstrual synchrony and suppression in college dormitories, Buckley explored the possibility that his informant’s account might refer to existing practices in former Yurok society: A menstruating woman should isolate herself, because this is the time when she is at the height of her powers. Thus the time should not be wasted in mundane tasks and social distractions, nor should one’s concentration be broken by concerns with the opposite sex. Rather, all of one’s energies should be applied in concentrated meditation “to find out the purpose of your life,” and toward the “accumulation” of spiritual energy. The menstrual shelter, or room, is “like the men’s sweathouse,” a place where you “go into yourself and make yourself stronger.” . . . Finally, the young woman said that, in old-time village life, all of a household’s fertile women who were not pregnant menstruated at the same time, a time dictated by the moon; that these women practiced the bathing rituals together at this time; and that men associated with the household used this time to “train hard” in the household’s sweathouse.79 As Barbara B. Harrell has argued in her article “Lactation and Menstruation in Cultural Perspective,” in preindustrial societies menstruation is uncommon, because lactation is prolonged and intensive and the menstrual cycle can therefore be considered as a “liminal state.”80 Celso and Dana also spoke of menstruation as a liminal state, but did not mention that in traditional societies women had significantly fewer menstrual cycles. To them its special significance did not depend upon the fact that it was an uncommon event, but upon the particular state of awareness it could provoke.81

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Menstruation is an ambivalent state between life and death. It implies the woman’s capacity to give life,82 but also her power to decide to interrupt a pregnancy and provoke menstruation.83 The pilgrims’ Mary Magdalene, who witnessed Jesus’s death and resurrection and was often represented with a skull at her side, was also related to death and life and to the passage between them. During one of Goddess Wood gatherings, Dana told a woman who had just lost her husband that Mary Magdalene had also lost her companion and therefore was a good role model for widows. Pilgrims spoke of menstrual blood as the blood of life but also saw menstruation as a moment of spiritual death for women. Dana explained that during their periods, women should meditate about impermanency and receive insight about the new cycle that would begin. Drawing on books about the power of menstruation,84 Dana observed that like the snake, symbolizing telluric powers, and the kundalini, the menstruating woman shed her skin (the inner lining of the womb) and prepared for a new cycle to begin. The pilgrims and their leaders sometimes referred to menstrual blood as the material out of which the ovule was made or the material that would have provided nurturing food for the future baby. Celso said: “Menstrual blood is not impure at all. From a biochemical point of view it is among the richest [kinds of blood] because it contains hormones, vitamins and mineral salts. It is a rich blood .  .  . organically these tissues must have the maximum potency because they must be able to give life. [They can] host life, for this reason it is the richest of all bloods” (February 16, 2006). The blood that had not been used to nurture the baby, and give life to a human being, should be used to nurture the Earth and to help plants and life in and on the earth to develop. At the end of the offering, Estrella covered the altar hole and what remained resembled a corpse buried in the earth.85 In a delayed menarche ritual for adult women described by Jone Salomonsen and analyzed in more detail in the next chapter, women explicitly refer to the ambiguous nature of menstrual blood singing: “Power of the blood, rain from the Dark Moon. Power of life and death, flow from our wombs.”86 In current times, women of fertile age who are not pregnant and do not use the contraceptive pill menstruate once a month and those who are on the pill experience a monthly bleed designed to mimic what is believed to be a normal menstrual period.87 As Harrell argues, “the preindustrial reproductive cycle with its intensive transition period suggests another view, that continuous menstrual cycling is not a natural attribute of human females. Perhaps ‘the curse’ can be explained as an artifact of the Age of Technology, something imposed upon women by a society of plenty which needs no more children. From the preindustrial reproductive cycle, we can learn that menstruation need not be regarded as the hallmark of healthy womanhood. Our femaleness need not be inextricably bound up with recurrent menstrual flow.”88

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Nevertheless, most Western women still consider a monthly menstrual flow to be normal and women taking the contraceptive pill talk about their monthly bleeding as menstruation. Given the low pregnancy rate in Western country, more women are menstruating more often than ever before. How do they make sense of this event, and how do they inscribe this sometimes painful monthly experience into their personal worldview? Considering their choice not to have a baby, like Dana, or not to have one yet, like Estrella, pilgrims from the Goddess Wood found a way to make sense of this monthly biological event and the state of nonpregnancy it represented through their rituals. To them the importance of menstruation did not derive only from its relation to fertility and future procreation, but also from its role as a source of spiritual insight and elevation. With their theories about menstruation they made sense of menstrual pain and premenstrual experiences of aggressiveness and anger. Emily Martin suggests a possible relationship between the premenstrual syndrome and the work condition of women in late industrial societies.89 She observes that women’s performance seems in fact to decline premenstrually and that literature about premenstrual syndrome describes women as malfunctioning and needing to have their “hormonal imbalances fixed”, instead of questioning the way in which work and society are structured and the constant discipline and productivity related to it.90 She writes: “I would like to suggest the possibility—though at this stage it cannot be proved—that the sources of this diffuse anger could well come from women’s perception, however inarticulate, of their oppression in society: of their lowered wage scales, lesser opportunities for advancement into high ranks, tacit omission from the language, coercion into roles inside the family and out that demand constant nurturance and self-denial—to only begin the list.”91 Pilgrims from Goddess Wood stated that women choosing to menstruate (i.e., not to have a baby and not to take the contraceptive pill) could use their lifecreating potentialities to foster their own spiritual elevation and to work toward a new kind of society based on equality between men and women. To them, the menstruating woman gave birth to a new and more conscious self. Most of the pilgrims in all three groups rejected the contraceptive pill as offering them a fake menstruation and also opposed hormone therapy during menopause. Dana even said that governments should allow menstruating women to take days off work, stating that Eva Peron had helped to promulgate a similar law in Argentina. She did not address the effect that such a law might have on the attainment of female equality on the workplace. As we can see here and also in the next two chapters, the pilgrims’ rituals had healing as a main focus and this healing was related both with the individual and the social body. With their menstrual rituals they not only wanted to come to terms with their own menstrual cycle, but also to oppose the way menstruation and more generally the female body were conceptualized in the social order they experienced.

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Comparing Contemporary Menstrual Rituals Since the 1990s, social scientists have described and analyzed menstrual rituals inspired by spiritual feminist ideals. Most of them talked about menarche rituals they either witnessed themselves92 or found described on the Internet93 or in books.94 Houseman refers to different web sites where mothers who desire to celebrate their daughter’s first menstruation can find instructions for rituals and even buy ritual sets or small menstrual goddesses in which to conserve part of the first blood.95 As Houseman observes: “present-day ritual crafting” can be used “as a means to test and reconsider certain ideas regarding the nature of ritual action in general.” The way in which these women create ceremonies to celebrate the power of menstrual blood allows one to observe the gradual appearance of new kind of rituals, whose characteristics slowly crystallize until they may become part of what is perceived as a tradition. Considering the rituals Eller96 evinced from feminist spirituality texts in the early 1990s, one can see that there are recurrent elements and shared ideas about the basic features menstrual rituals should have. Eller mentions a ritual that serves to create a blood tie among women:97 One such ritual, designed by Diane Mariechild,98 involves participants lighting red and white candles to signify strength (“I bleed and am not wounded”) and pure spirit (“I am virgin, one-in-myself”). This is followed by the passing of a dish of menstrual blood, into which women may dip their fingers and make a mark on their foreheads, saying, “This is the blood of my body, the blood of renewal, the blood of life.” A length of red yarn is then used to weave the circle of women together, to represent their blood ties to one another. At the end of the ritual, each woman is given a piece of the yarn to tie around her wrist and take home as a reminder of this symbol of women’s power.99 In this account there is no explicit mention of a blood sisterhood, created by the mixing of menstrual blood, but there is the idea that the monthly shedding of menstrual blood is one element that creates a bond among women. It is not specified whose menstrual blood is shared among the women, who do not drink from it but circulate it like food on a dish and establish a physical contact with it through touch. The red yarn tied around the wrist resembles the red ritual girdle crocheted by Dana’s pilgrims and first worn during the ritual in the wood. The white candle representing virginity as “one-in-myself” evokes the image of the Virgin Mary and interpretations of her virginity in a spiritual sense. As an independent American pilgrim explained to me, Mary was called a Virgin not because she had never had sexual contact with men, but because she had

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attained a particular state of elevation that made her whole and immaculate. Eller also observes that spiritual feminists do not see virginity such as that attributed to the Greek Goddess Artemis as “sexual innocence” but as “sexual self-possession,” as “virgin goddesses are free to relate sexually to whomever they choose.”100 The reference to virginity in Diane Mariechild’s ritual might also apply to the recuperation of a sense of sexual integrity after sexual abuse. Dana explained that offering menstrual blood to the Earth also helped to heal wounds related to sexuality.101 The problem when considering this and other descriptions or instructions for rituals is that one cannot know whether these were subsequently enacted by women following the exact sequence or used just as a reference to create a more complex ritual structure. Dana for instance told me that for the ceremony of the last blood during the first pilgrimage she had used some elements from the writings of Diane Stein and Zsuzsanna Budapest102 about menstrual rituals and rites of passage and made them into a complete ritual. As Houseman103 observes, analyzing the menarche ritual described and filmed by Fellous104 in New Age and Neopagan menstrual rituals: “The idea is not to do now what a Celtic priestess, say, did in her day, but to do what such a priestess might do if she were practicing today as a middle class European-American. In short, creative adaptation is preferred over straight-out reiteration .  .  . Neopagan and New Age ritualists are engaged in simulating these prior performers’ intentional and emotional states.”105 Michael Houseman further argues that “the complexity . . . resides not in the paradoxical properties of the items of behavior undertaken, but in the ambivalent identities of those who undertake them.” There is “a ‘vertical’ refraction of the participants’ agency” that relates them to women from the past doing equivalent rituals106 and, one might add, also to those women celebrating menstrual rituals in future. During the ceremony of the mixing of the blood, Antònia and others felt the presence not only of the women physically in the room, but also of those from the previous pilgrimage and other more ancient presences. During the trip Dana referred to the pilgrims of the next Pilgrimage of the Blood in 2006 and more generally to future pilgrims and blood sisters. Performing the pilgrimage and the common offering of menstrual blood every two years, Dana was slowly creating a tradition and a ritual pattern. The moments when women shared their own feelings and insights after the most salient rituals in Dana’s group were considered important events. The other women could and should be used as a mirror, allowing one to see one’s different life phases. Younger women allowed the older pilgrim to see the woman she had been and any characteristics of that stage of life she might want to recover whereas older women could serve as a reference for the future for younger pilgrims. The hierarchy based on age used during the offering in the wood fostered this process of mirroring, and showed each pilgrim her place in the group.

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The complexity of identities taken on by women also emerged in Salomonsen’s107 description of a menarche ritual. The experience of one’s identity as a union of different personalities appears in these rituals as a way to enact and heal the fragmentation experienced by these women. Reflecting themselves in the other women of the circle and also with other women in the past and the future, they could perceive unity in multiplicity. This fostered a sense of being whole, “one-in-myself,” but also one-with-the-others. This feeling of being “whole” and “healed”108 is opposed to being wounded and separated from parts of oneself. The aim of these rituals and of the entire Mary Magdalene pilgrimage was to attain wholeness again by curing these wounds and to overcome their sense of separation from what they identified as their feminine side. They thereby acquired a sense of union with their fellow pilgrims and with other women in general. Through their offering these women wanted to transform the relationship they had with their periods, provoking a shift on a personal level. But they also wanted to work toward a general shift in the social perception of menstruation. The stories of healing told by the pilgrims in this and in the following chapter show that rituals offer ways to enact values and embody new meanings helping the pilgrims to redefine their identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and religion. They are “means to explore alternatives,”109 at once a way to demonstrate that a different world is possible and to experience that different world.

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Wounded Magdalenes

As we have seen, one of the most common reasons for Celso’s pilgrims to join the trip was to discover, heal, or empower their feminine part. For Dana’s pilgrims, the trip was an occasion to explore one of the most feminine biological events and to establish a strong bond with Mother Earth and with other women. Roger’s pilgrims were on a quest for the Sacred Feminine. All the other pilgrims that I spoke to were women searching to heal or enhance their feminine essence. This quest was above all a female quest, but three of the male pilgrims who I got to know well told me about their efforts to get in touch with their female side. Celso and Roger, likewise, had been exploring aspects of the Sacred Feminine for many years. For many of the pilgrims, Mary Magdalene was a kind of guide on this pilgrimage in honor of the Feminine. What emerged from the accounts of the pilgrims of all three groups was the idea that Magdalene could help to heal wounds related to their feminine side. Once I got to know the pilgrims better, I learned that in most cases their personal quests had begun with a traumatic experience: they felt that their feminine essence had been compromised with wounds mostly related to sexuality.1 The pilgrims maintained that Magdalene could help in healing these wounds because she herself had been wounded, through being misrepresented by Church fathers as a repentant prostitute. Magdalene, too, they often said, had been condemned and rejected because of her sexuality, but had nevertheless managed to maintain her place at Jesus’s side and could now appear in all her splendor and importance. According to the homeopathic principle “like heals like,” and hence Magdalene energy was an appropriate remedy for the pilgrims’ wounds. A year after the pilgrimage, Roger told me about his first meeting with Mary Magdalene at the top of the mountain of the Sainte-Baume in 2000: We climbed to the top, and there is a little, very crude, concrete chapel at the top [Saint-Pilon chapel], and there I had a very moving experience. I felt her presence; it was quite healing actually. I would say that I tuned in to the spirit of Magdalene and I understood that I had a lot of 191

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her healing power around me, because I worked a lot with wounded women; women who’d had difficult marriages; women who’d been divorced, like my mother. My mother felt rejected by the church. I worked a lot with women who’d had sexual problems, rape, past life memories of abuse, and so I am very empathetic to women’s problems. And she [Magdalene] said: “I’m with you when you work this way. That is my role. Mary is sort of inside the church, the respectable (one), everyone can relate to Mary; but women who felt rejected by the church, that is where I go, because I was a rejected woman.” . . . “Don’t,” she said, “take on too much in your work, you should ask for help, and I’m always there if you need help.” Great! So that was the first real connection, so from then on, whenever I’d go to a shrine or a place that was associated with her, I could say I’m at home. (November 6, 2006) Roger’s perception of Magdalene as helping his therapeutic work on sexual wounds and on the sense of being rejected by the Church confirmed what I had observed not only among his pilgrims but also among the others. In this chapter we will see the different kinds of wounds the pilgrims referred to and the way they represented Mary Magdalene as a wounded healer. In this context her relationship with menstruation also seemed to be about a wounded area of femininity. We will also consider the pilgrims’ ideas about two particular kinds of wounds related to Mother Earth: those inflicted on the Earth by humans, and those felt in humans through their loss of connection with Her. To close the consideration of menstrual rituals and the interrelation of menstrual blood, sexual wounds and the healing of the pilgrims’ femininity, in the next chapter we will look at the process of menopause and its ritualization at the end of the Goddess Wood pilgrimage.

The Wounded Healer In Roger’s terms, the archetype of the lover had been wounded and this wound, which affected all of Western civilization, could now slowly be healed through the return of Mary Magdalene. Published texts about menstruation and women’s spirituality, considered above, portray menstruation as a “wise” wound, the symbolic place of Eve’s curse imposed on women. In the pilgrims’ accounts, menstruation was the quintessential female sexual wound, because its denigration expressed, in Christian terms, the sense of guilt, sin, shame and dirtiness imposed on women because of their gender. For Roger, Magdalene, like a second Eve, could heal the menstrual wound and reverse the curse inflicted on women by Yahweh after the fall on mankind. As Warner observes: “For mankind, these curses were the struggle against nature, of which hitherto Adam had

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been master; mortality of the flesh; and for woman in particular, the pains of childbearing—the whole gamut from menstruation to suckling—and subjection of heart and head to the authority of the male.”2 Most pilgrims from all three groups held that women who, thanks to Magdalene, had recovered their connection with the Feminine and knew about its sacrality would not experience menstruation, childbearing or suckling as painful, but instead would enjoy them. They would learn how to take care of and listen to their bodies, venerating their flesh as a divine part of the body of the Goddess. Katherine Jansen3 described the Magdalene staying at the cross and witnessing Jesus’s death as the symbolic counterpart of Eve: whereas Eve had caused the Fall of mankind, Magdalene witnessed and helped Jesus to sacrifice himself and redeem the original sin. But even if they seemed to share this position, the three pilgrimage leaders never explicitly mentioned Magdalene’s function as a helper in redeeming Eve’s fall and the menstrual curse. Magdalene did figure as a sexual healer in the accounts of pilgrims in all the three groups. The reader may recall that Margot, given up for adoption at birth, considered that Magdalene helped her to overcome prejudice. When Margot herself was an unmarried mother twenty years later, she decided to keep her daughter and raise her alone. Childless women in Dana’s group felt that Magdalene helped them to feel at ease in a society where femininity was still strongly related to maternity. There were other kinds of wounds that Magdalene also helped to cure. As we have seen, the pilgrims mentioned that they felt they had lost their contact with their female side; they were negating it or not living it out in the way they felt to be right. The Iberian pilgrims for instance spoke of “my interior goddess” (mi diosa interior) and of living out or manifesting their goddess (vivir/ manifestar mi diosa). The Italians tended to speak of the feminine and masculine inside and outside themselves, mostly because Celso always emphasized that one could not develop one side without the other. To contact and live out the Feminine, the pilgrims seemed to need a model of reference. They found that they could feel the sacred feminine energy by connecting with that of Mary Magdalene and use this as a starting point to experience their own feminine side they had negated. The pilgrims also needed to heal specific wounds that most of them had clearly identified as the primary block preventing them from living out their feminine part. They often described these wounds as sexual, or related to sexual energy or sexuality. When I speak of sexual wounds, I follow the pilgrims’ usage by referring to emotional as well as physical injuries related to sexuality and, in a wider sense, to procreation as well. The wounds they reported included physical and emotional traumas such as sexual abuse, miscarriage, abortion, incest, and situations in which women were induced to feel guilty, inferior, and even dangerous because of their gender or sexual choices.

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In popular books and articles about sexual awareness, menstruation, sacred sexuality, and female shamanism, the authors often report events and feelings similar to those of the pilgrims. Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, was violated sexually and physically4 by her father. Tamara Slayton, a menstrual activist who organized menarche seminars in California in the 1990s, bore a child at the age of fifteen, which she gave up for adoption.5 Lara Owen also had a miscarriage that she experienced as a traumatic event, and which may have precipitated her research into the menstrual cycle.

“I Don’t Want You to Be a Slut”: The Case of Maria Rosa Maria Rosa, the Catalan woman with a handicapped daughter who accompanied Encarna on an independent pilgrimage to Provence in 2004, had a life story that included many of the sexual wounds that other pilgrims reported separately: incest, sexual abuse, male condemnation of female sexuality, a sense of guilt for being attractive, fear of one’s own sexuality, miscarriage, and surgery on reproductive organs. It also included acting out wounded behavior such as female competition for men, triangular relationships with two women competing for one man, and a sense of opposition between a virginal, ascetic side and a passionate, sexual side. A case of incest in her wider family had deeply affected Maria Rosa’s life. Her grandmother had been unfaithful to her husband (with a cousin), and the husband left her and their children, causing a scandal. Maria Rosa’s father had never seen his own father again, even though both lived in Barcelona. Maria Rosa was named for this paternal grandmother Rosa, who had raised her children on her own. As Maria Rosa grew up, she received a lot of sexual attention from men and always felt her father’s fear that she might repeat his mother’s mistakes by giving in to her sexual impulses: “As I attracted many men, my father always reprimanded me because I had a very penetrating glance [that attracted men’s attention]. But I believe that my father projected on to me what he had never forgiven his mother for. Because she had a relationship, his father abandoned them. My father would get angry. In fact I had a love-hate relationship with my father. And when he got angry he used to tell me: ‘I don’t want you to be a slut’” (November 23, 2005). As a teenager, Maria Rosa was repeatedly sexually abused by her doctor, but did not dare tell her parents because she was sure her father would blame her. Even after marriage, Maria Rosa felt that she needed to be careful or she might betray her husband and use her sexual power by becoming a slut. When I met her, she confessed that she felt she had put on weight as a way of avoiding being

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attractive to other men. After reading The Da Vinci Code and feeling in tune with its theories, Maria Rosa had decided to go on the pilgrimage. She was particularly touched by the fact that in the novel Magdalene was referred to as the rose: I received [the message] that this was a journey that would help you contact your feminine side. And well, [after receiving this message] things happen to you, you realize that in your life you always felt good with men, that you have played the part of the Magdalene as well, of the sinner. I feel like a sinner, you know, in many things. Not particularly in this sense [of being a prostitute] but, well, I do identify myself with this woman. And that book [The Da Vinci Code], the clues it offers you lead you to do the journey. As if there I would find all the answers I needed. So we decided to go to the Magdalene [Sainte-Baume] and there I did indeed receive answers. (November 23, 2005) When I asked Maria Rosa to explain what she meant when she said that she felt like a sinner, she said: Because I believe that my creative energy, always went . . ., well, I could have been a sinner. Because I had a strong sexual energy and because I attracted a lot of men and this might have led me towards that. And I believe that this derives from the Rosa [part],6 it was what happened to my grandmother, and I carry this energy with me. And I held it back. One of the things that I realized is that now Oriol [Maria Rosa’s husband] and I are doing precisely that: he became conscious of the fact that he also put me under pressure so that I put on weight. We did this as some kind of self-defense from that. I protected myself from that as well. (November 23, 2005) When speaking about the possibility of adultery and her attractiveness, Maria Rosa did not even use these words and spoke of “that” (eso). When I asked her what she and her husband were protecting themselves from, she answered: “From the fact that I am a person who could be attractive and that I might feel sexual desire with other people . . . now [being fatter than before] I do not attract others any longer . . . well, let’s see, it is a way of saying, if you do not attract them, then you do not even feel like doing it” (November 23, 2005). Some years before the pilgrimage, Maria Rosa had had her tubes tied so that she could no longer become pregnant. She had taken this decision after a traumatic pregnancy which had occurred in spite of an IUD and which ended in a miscarriage. The weeks that she was pregnant were terrible for her, because her husband became very angry and she was afraid of bearing another child with a birth defect. Even though she did not want the child, Maria Rosa suffered when

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she had the miscarriage and decided that she would never again expose herself to such a risk. Throughout her whole life, Maria Rosa felt in constant competition with the women of her family and with women in general. As a child, she felt her mother’s envy over the special relationship she had with her father. As a result of therapeutic sessions of different kinds that Maria Rosa went to in order to accept and understand her daughter’s handicap, she came to feel that she had somehow caused her daughter’s handicap. She felt that she had done this so that her daughter would not be a rival for her husband’s attention and love. At the time we talked about her life, Maria Rosa had just finished an art therapy session during which she had to write her name in different styles, and she told me what she had discovered. She felt the Rosa part strongly inside herself—that is, the passionate, man-loving and dangerous part that related her to her paternal grandmother. She called this her Magdalene part, also relating it to the use Dan Brown makes of the symbol of the rose as related to the saint. However, Maria Rosa had some problems with the Maria part, which she saw as linked to a more religious and contemplative side of her personality: The carnal part is in perfect shape, my Magdalene part. In the sense that men always liked me and I always had a good relationship with men and so on. I did not have sexual relationships with them, you know, but they always came towards me, good relationships with men, not with women. This conflict with my feminine part . . . This divine part was difficult for me to accept, this Maria that links me with religion and with the Virgin, I did not accept it until two weeks ago [when Maria Rosa did the creative artwork with her name]. (November 23, 2005) Again at this point Maria Rosa felt the need to emphasize that she had not had sexual relationships with men other than her husband. The contrast between the Magdalene part and the Virgin part appeared graphically when the divine, religious Maria met the fleshy, carnal Rosa. She said she felt ill at ease with the Marian part of her feminine side, and yet she had modeled her life on the norms and prohibitions represented by it. She had struggled to resist the ongoing temptation of her Rosa side and settled the tension between Maria and Rosa by denying the latter. Overweight and with her fallopian tubes tied, Maria Rosa was no longer dangerous in her father’s and her husband’s eyes. She had lived according to the rules dictated by the men of her family, but now that she was entering menopause, she felt that the tension between the two poles related to female sexuality could be resolved. Like other pilgrims, Maria Rosa was trying to make peace with her feminine side, or rather to make peace between the Magdalene and the Virgin Mary side.

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In the wood of the Sainte-Baume, Maria Rosa had a healing experience that helped her “open the heart,” as she said, and made her feel a different and healed relationship with her daughter and her family: Before arriving at the cave, we meditated sitting on some rocks nearby. And there I can tell you that I really had a very strong experience of love, whether or not it was the Magdalene I don’t know, but my heart opened wide and I felt as if my breasts were growing. If I were to choose a symbol for it, I would say that it was as if they were giving me something to nurture the others, you know. Immediately after this meditation, my brother-in-law called me. He was with my daughter and my mother-in-law. And he asked me, “Listen, did you call me?” It was as if the meditation had given me something to share with the whole world. (November 23, 2005) Maria Rosa interpreted her brother-in-law’s call as proof of the connection and love she had felt and discussed the whole issue thoroughly with her two fellow pilgrims. Female pilgrims often felt Magdalene’s energy or presence in their breasts, ovaries, wombs, and hearts. Some reported Magdalene’s energy in their breasts, with sensations similar to those of lactation. In the past, women prayed to Magdalene to make milk rise in the breasts. This practice developed because of a myth in the Golden Legend (ca. 1260), in which the dead queen of Marseilles had miraculously breast-fed her baby for several months until the return of her husband, who had sailed with the apostle Peter to Rome. Maria Rosa travelled to Southern France with Encarna and another friend; they went with no exact ideas about how to make the pilgrimage, nor did they have specific rituals in mind. They spontaneously reacted to the energy perceptions they received from the landscape and the sanctuaries with meditations, energy connections, or ritual gestures such as lighting a candle or cleansing each other using different devices like crystals or incense sticks. The healing process described by Maria Rosa fostered by Mary Magdalene’s energy bears similarities with healing experiences described by other pilgrims. Again we can observe the centrality of the energy discourse and of bodily perceptions. What happens is a sort of restructuring and bringing back to wholeness of parts of the body related to gender and sexuality that allow Maria Rosa to redefine her gendered identity and her place in her family. She does not take for granted the effectiveness of the healing that has taken place during the meditation, but validates it by incorporating it in the context of her life narrative and relating it to a concrete event (the phone call). She then comments on the whole experience with her fellow pilgrims thereby again certifying her experience through the feedback of her small spiritual community.

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Wounds from Incestuous, Adulterous, and Forbidden Relationships Many of the pilgrims reported that Mary Magdalene healed relationships considered immoral in the society where they took place. Roger referred to these relationships as forbidden; these liaisons had been experienced by pilgrims themselves or by members of the pilgrim’s immediate and wider family. Leonard’s wife Elisabeth had been sexually abused by her father, a preacher. As a result, she distrusted Christian institutions and linked the Church with experiences of abuse and torture in past lives, always perpetrated by priests. Elisabeth’s own relationship with a married Asian man was not easily accepted by the farmers of upstate New York in the late 1960s and 1970s. There were other cases of incest in the pilgrims’ stories. Encarna, the independent pilgrim whose husband had a secret daughter with his secretary, had been in love with her cousin. After the first Magdalene pilgrimage, she decided to allow herself to experience a sexual relationship with him in order to exorcise the feelings that she felt had prevented both of them from establishing harmonious partnerships and marriages. She related this decision to Magdalene’s teachings about the sacrality of sex. Maria Rosa’s story shows that even if the incest had happened two generations before, it influenced the way pilgrims perceived their own sexuality and its condemnation in a society pervaded by Christian values. Dana’s maternal family had fled to Argentina from Spain because of an incest-related scandal. Her maternal great-grandfather Rodrigo had lost his wife when their only daughter, Dana’s grandmother, was born. At her deathbed, Rodrigo swore that he would never marry again. Dana’s grandmother was raised by Rodrigo and a cousin of the mother, who was fifteen years old. When this young girl became pregnant by Rodrigo the family left for Argentina, and the baby was born on the ship they traveled on. They went on to have four more children but never married because of Rodrigo’s vow to his dying wife. Nobody knew that they were not married until Dana’s grandmother decided to marry and was asked for her parents’ documents. William, the American university professor traveling with his wife in Roger’s group, reported another instance. His paternal grandmother was ill, and so his father was raised by an uncle. William had little contact with his extended family and only after his father’s death learned that the uncle had sexually abused his father. Some pilgrims had thought of themselves as the fruit of a relationship labeled as sinful. As related in the introduction, Margot was given up for adoption after her Irish mother became pregnant by a married man. Even if Margot gave birth in a different and more permissive time, she still felt rejected and judged by her adoptive parents, who did not want to see the child during the first months. In

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Celso’s group there was another woman who had been given up for adoption when she was still a baby and who had decided to keep this a secret, revealing it only to a few chosen people. We have already seen that Roger grew up as the only child of a mother whose husband had abandoned her when Roger was two years old. During the Magdalene sharing in Le-Puy he said that Magdalene had helped him to overcome people’s critical attitudes toward his relationships: For me Magdalene has been very important in healing the other side of Christian marriage, the woundedness of people who are divorced, who live in relationships that are not countenanced by the church, the forbidden relationships and particularly love relationships, sexual relationships. She has been a very important figure to me in my search for what I call the Aphrodite archetype, the wounded Aphrodite archetype. And she’s been a big part of healing of five generations of sexual wounding in my family. It went back to North Germany. I had to trace my ancestors back five generations, to find out where . . . the curse of that family marriage came through. It comes through Hamburg where my great great grandmother lived. And [she] ran away to find a new life in England and she never talked about it. Like Hamlet, the time is out of joint, of course it’s time that I am born to set it right. And through psychoanalysis, psychodrama, painting, regression and all sorts of things I’ve managed to reconstruct the family history and start to heal that very wounded great-great-grandmother. And a big part of her healing I attribute to the spirit of Mary Magdalene. (October 6, 2005) Referring to his first visit to the Sainte-Baume, Roger added: “Some years later [after my first visit to the Sainte-Baume] it’s an option for me to review, which I’m doing, my own progress, my own healing, my own fractured families, difficult marriages. And seeing that healing is really happening. And I thank her for this, it will continue” (October 6, 2005). Like Roger, other pilgrims felt they had wounds from forbidden relationships they themselves had created. Felicia, the skeptical biologist from Dana’s group, was having relationships with two married men at the time of the pilgrimage. For these women, the independent and sexual Magdalene helped them to overcome the last vestige of guilt, as in Felicia’s case, or to confront a deeper sense of being a fallen woman. The youngest pilgrim from Celso’s group, who had just turned forty, felt a kinship to Magdalene because she always ended up having affairs with men who were already in relationships with other women. In Roger’s group, Lynn, travelling with her husband William, described a similar situation in more detail. An elegant long-limbed woman with long brown curly hair, Lynn was in her late sixties and had shy eyes and a gentle voice. She

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was born in Baltimore but grew up in Texas. Her father’s family had French origins and was related to a famous colonel during the Texan War of Independence, who later became the second President of the Republic of Texas. Her parents were nominal Christians, and Lynn did not know whether she had been baptized or not. After a relationship with a man who left her to enter seminary because he was afraid to love her more than he loved Christ, Lynn married a Marine second lieutenant at the age of eighteen. Lynn was divorced in 1971 by her first husband, who imposed a masculine, almost military lifestyle on her: “The Marine Corps has a very strong heroic ethos; the men are brave, they’re strong and anything feminine is really rejected,” she said. “He would say things like this: If he liked the meal that I cooked, he promoted me to ‘sergeant,’ if something went wrong he would demote me to ‘corporal’ or ‘private.’ It was ridiculous. Just awful” (October 4, 2005). When her husband found out that Lynn was having affairs with other men, he asked for a divorce. The following year, Lynn fell in love with William, her former teacher, and they eventually married. Lynn had a master’s degree in counseling, but shortly after marrying William she entered a pottery shop, realizing that she loved clay, and became a potter. Lynn felt guilty for having been unable to end the marriage herself: My first marriage was very structured and hard and painful for me, and it took a long time for me to see that with any clarity. And then I got out of that marriage by having affairs, and then I was doing that after the marriage was over for another year. And I’ve carried that as a kind of guilt. I realized that the idea of Magdalene as a woman is perhaps only fabulous, perhaps only a rumor; I know that it is not scriptural. But I went into the first church [Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille] and I thought, well there’s a correspondence. Then I also feel my marriage with William is a very redeeming thing. But there is guilt around and I think maybe, on this pilgrimage, I’ll be able to put that down and to say: “It was what it had to be.” What I have now is the real thing. So for me that’s rather big. I always liked the idea of being redeemed. (October 4, 2005) William and Lynn raised together the children each had from a previous marriage. Lynn felt that, unlike her first husband, William accepted her feminine part and had helped her to begin a redemption process, as Jesus had helped Magdalene: “Clearly she [Magdalene] did feel redeemed. She supported Jesus, financially and as an affiliate; he forgave her. Maybe he didn’t even see it as a problem to be forgiven. Anyway it ended up in straight generosity and I bet she stopped feeling guilty, if she ever did” (October 4, 2005). Like Lynn, Luciana, Gianmichele’s partner, whose nun side was in constant struggle with her woman side, felt ill at ease because of a relationship. The

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Magdalene pilgrimage forced her to face her sense of guilt in her relationship with Gianmichele, who was then still married. Several women who had suffered from partnerships they described as abusive or denigrating told me that Magdalene had helped them to heal their relationship with men and to accept and forgive the past partners who had hurt them. A good example of this is Encarna, who eventually managed to forgive her ex-husband Alberto for having a child with his secretary and keeping the secret over several years. The idea of Magdalene seemed to allow women to see men as potential helpers, who could accept and understand the Feminine and honor its powers, as Jesus had done with Magdalene. Sali spoke of another insight she had on the first pilgrimage of the blood in the summer of 2002: One of the important insights [I had during the pilgrimage] happened on the first night. We had to sleep on the beach, but it was pouring rain, it was impossible. So there was a sort of division in the group: some pilgrims did not want to pay for a hotel because it was too expensive and they could not afford it, and others wanted to pay for a hotel. So we stood there discussing it for hours until it was 11 p.m. and then midnight . . . At some point, as if by magic, two policemen appeared. We were there in the middle of a roundabout, in the middle of nowhere, it was dark and we could not find a cheap hotel. And these two policemen arrived called Jacques and Michel. And moreover, James and Michael are the two guides associated with Mary Magdalene, and all the women were like: “Wow!” . . . So finally they rescued us as if they were our knights, they found a little motel that was cheap and we could go there to sleep all together. So for me, well, for me it was the moment to say: “You see, you with your impetus and your impulsiveness, you could have lost the chance to find a solution that was good for everybody.” (September 21, 2005) Sali understood that she had a tendency to control and organize things for herself and others; as such, she often did not allow men to help her. This experience made her understand that men could act like knights, serving and protecting women on their quest for the Sacred Feminine and in their everyday lives. As we can see from these accounts, through their pilgrimages women found that not only could they reshape their relationship with themselves as women and embody their femininity and sexuality according to different schemes and norms, but also they could restructure their relationship with men. Acknowledging the wounding and often disabling effects certain male figures had had in their lives, they perceived the possibility of a different model of masculinity. As we will see from some women’s accounts after the pilgrimage, these changes affected as well their everyday relationships with men.

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Abortion, Miscarriage, and Operations on Reproductive Organs Pilgrims also reported sexual wounds related to miscarriage and abortion. As we have seen, Maria Rosa had an unwanted pregnancy and then a miscarriage. Dana had lost a baby in prison in Argentina after being beaten and Lara Owen’s miscarriage marked her deeply. Women told me about difficult decision to terminate pregnancies and the resulting guilt and grief. It seemed that miscarriages and abortions remained vivid, left their memory on the body and made it more difficult for women to relate to their reproductive organs. As Lara said, she “did not live down there,” and other women reported that they did not want to feel that area either, because this would involve feeling the pain stored there as well. I report only one case because most of the women did not feel comfortable speaking in detail about such intimate things, particularly those who had chosen to abort. Encarna had decided to have an abortion when she became pregnant for the third time. She felt that the relationship with her husband Alberto was deteriorating, and even though she had not yet learned that Alberto had a daughter with another woman she knew she did not want to have another child from him. Some years later Encarna began to attend a workshop on female spirituality when her elder daughter developed an ovarian cyst and needed an operation. She felt that she had passed her own negative ideas about being a woman on to her daughters and that she needed to heal herself to be able to help them. Encarna felt guilty because when this elder daughter had her first period, she had transmitted the idea that menstruation was a burden and not something to be celebrated. Some time later, Encarna herself underwent an operation and lost her ovaries and uterus: When my daughter, the eldest, had her period, her first period, and she was—she had not turned twelve yet, a girl—the expression I used was: “Oh, my girl, now you’re sorted out, aren’t you?”7 it was like saying “Uf, what you’ve got coming . . . ” So I know now, with time and after these workshops [on female spirituality], I knew that I had hurt her. I laid a burden on her, so that she too would deny that part of herself. And in fact she did deny it, in fact her ovaries also became diseased [like mine]. And then I got so bad that I even lost them [the ovaries], and then I realized the importance of this bleeding for the regeneration of my body and of that life [force contained in the blood]. (February 26, 2005) Like Lara Owen, Encarna interpreted gynecological problems as the symptom of a denial of her sexuality and her discomfort at being a woman:

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I began to discover, well, that I am a woman. I mean, I began to make peace with that female side [I was talking about]. Because until then there was a sort of denial [of that female side]; I identified more with the masculine part . . . the masculine has more ‘value’ in it. This is probably the ideology that I was brought up with, that the man, well, is much more important, he is much more likely to be successful in the world . . . The woman is just there to stay at home and to stay below the man. What I mean here is the dependency on the man. (February 26, 2005) Others told me that they felt that, in being born women, they had chosen the wrong side, because they would never have the same opportunities as men. So they decided to be as similar to men as possible. Through the pilgrimage these women consciously sought a positive access to their femininity that could unfold related to but not dependent on the presence of a male partner.

Growing Up as a Woman in a Masculine World Dana had explained that the offering of blood was an initiation ritual that marked a change in each pilgrim’s life: Women would feel that there was a before and after to it, and that they were not the same person they had been. Most of her pilgrims agreed, saying that after the pilgrimage, and particularly after the ritual of blood offering, they felt different. Antònia told me about this change and the way it affected her capacity to live out her femininity: It was a total liberation and I think that from that point on there really began to exist a before and an after. I had experienced the rest of the pilgrimage more internally, but that was for me the moment of inflection, there was a major change after that moment, a change within . . . I think that there was, I would say that a change in my perception took place . . . from that moment on I felt myself really a woman. Woman, goddess, or . . . but I really felt my connection with the Feminine. For me that was the absolute change of perception, in that moment and after that moment even more. But I feel that was, for me, the first ritual of total connection with my femininity, with the Feminine, in capital letters. I mean, with the Goddess, with the Mother, with the Earth. I became really conscious of my being, of my person, of my interior as feminine and I know that this represented a before and after. Because the previous events were, I suppose, steps towards this, but from that ritual onwards everything was really totally different. And I know that my life has changed from that moment. (June 4, 2005)

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I asked what Antònia meant when she spoke about a feeling of connection with the Feminine. Had she never had that feeling before? How did it manifest itself? Antònia answered that she was familiar with the feeling, she had experienced it on special occasions in the past, but she had not been able to identify it as such, she was not conscious of it: I had no consciousness of it. Because of my human experience, as a consequence of the kind of society I lived in, the environment I lived in, femininity was not an element that was really [considered] important. I renounced living out my femininity for a very long time, I accepted it [my femininity] grudgingly8 because there was no other solution. It was clear that physically I was a woman, but it was very hard for me to accept my femininity. But I really think that from that day on, I was able to reconcile with my femininity in an authentic way, from the most profound part of my being. (June 4, 2005) Antònia had been working toward this connection with the Feminine for several years by going to workshops about femininity. She had tried techniques from Gestalt therapy, but she felt that this kind of psychological approach did not truly make a difference to her conscious experience of her own life: “I negated my maternal aspect of caregiving and thanks to these psychological workshops, I really could accept it as it was, but it was more a question of accepting it at an emotional level, not on the level of lived experience. It [the pilgrimage] was a lived out experience, that is what it was . . . and I don’t know but, now that I am speaking to you, I think that maybe that was the burden Clara lifted from me with the sahumador during the beginning of the ritual” (June 4, 2005). Antònia thought that perhaps the burden that Clara had helped release with copal smoke at the beginning of the ritual of offering of menstrual blood came from her childhood. Antònia was born into a small village near Vic, in Catalonia. Her parents would have preferred a boy because in an agrarian community women were considered useless.9 Her father ran a produce trucking company, and the family needed strong men to continue the business. When Antònia’s brother was born there was a big celebration, and the brother always had more freedom and privileges than she, even though he was younger. When Antònia had her first period it was considered a problem, because from then on she could become pregnant. Her family felt the need to control her all the time. Antònia’s family did not have a strong Catholic tradition, because her paternal grandfather had been an anarchist during the Spanish Civil War. He was executed and Antònia’s grandmother struggled to survive in a small village, where she and her two children were despised as comunistas. This grandmother managed to “raise the family from its ashes” and set the model for women in the family, who were required to be strong and as effective as a man. Antònia described her grandmother and aunt as

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“not really feminine, but instead strong and capable of doing everything that was necessary, very authoritative, very Thatcher-like. They did not take care of themselves [in terms of their appearance].” Women in Antònia’s family were not supposed to waste their time on “women’s stuff,” and when Antònia’s mother married into the family, she was treated like a servant. I grew up there, I know where the story of the superwoman [sic, in English] comes from and of being able to manage every situation and always being able to say that nothing has gone wrong. But in some ways probably my femininity clearly did not exist either, because this was my model. And so when I began to develop into a teenager, I felt ill at ease, I used to walk around hunched over,10 I did not want to be a woman. I played with my brother’s friends and later with my own friends. My best friends were my male friends. Now I know that this also made my femininity difficult. If there was something brave to do, I was the first to do it and the fact that I was a woman was simply irrelevant in my life. It was like that and that’s it, like someone who is born with a mole on the nose, it’s the way it is . . . and you have to put up with it.11 The less importance you pay to it, the better. It is clear that I did not feel myself to be a woman, and I only began to really feel that I was a woman when I was about 25 . . . I used to say that I didn’t want to have children until the moment came when one could open a can and take the children out of it. During that period [when I was 25 years old] there was a change in my life, and it was then that I began to study psychology which I know involved a qualitative change in my life. (June 4, 2005) Only after the group offering of menstrual blood, did Antònia completely feel like a woman for the first time. This new identity later helped her in her work as a teacher of male prisoners. Sali, the Catalan manager and coach, also mentioned that her experiences on the pilgrimage and the model of Mary Magdalene allowed her to be a woman in a masculine world without denying her femininity: Most of all I like the role of the initiator, you know. This presence [of the Magdalene] that made her capable of initiating somebody for a hard mission, as she did with Jesus. The mission of Mary Magdalene was a great inspiration for me. Even at a professional level it is my metaphor. Usually I do not explain it [this metaphor], because it involves an idea of Mary Magdalene most people do not have. But within myself, when I do my work and I explain to myself what I do and why I do it, [I see that] my work has this connotation, you know. It involves accompanying leaders so that they can take up their role, their function. For this

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reason I like the way she was, that power, without showing off, acting from the shadows, from the hidden, staying in second place, but still being so present and so strong, particularly at a time when women played a very limited role. (September 21, 2005) Unlike other female pilgrims, who had fought to obtain a social and economic position that made her feel equal to men, Immacolata had always felt that as a woman she was a victim in a male-dominated society. This woman from Rome who led a double life, concealing her spiritual faith and practice from her Catholic family and from the conservative, mainly Catholic, people she met day to day, told me in her hesitant way: I . . . I don’t know if it was the journey or because of other reasons . . . but I feel myself much more . . . Whereas before I felt myself to be a woman, but more of a victim, now I feel great force, great power. I feel it, yes, I felt it a lot, and this is something really beautiful. Probably the journey contributed to this . . . because I always felt like the one who had to undergo things. I mean, you were born woman . . . you had this misfortune. This also is in some way part of the Southern Italian mentality of my parents, that . . . it’s a misfortune [to be a woman] .  .  . Because there is a difference between the woman who has to find her way through indirect, hidden ways, and the fact of feeling it [the power of being a woman], of feeling it like a sense of being one’s own center, of being centered .  .  . this has been something, a really beautiful feeling, I did not have before. (April 8, 2005) Even if Immacolata’s case was different from that of Antònia and Sali, the function of Magdalene for them was similar: she helped all three women feel at ease at work without renouncing their feminine side, and to experience this side as a valuable resource rather than a problem. In Immacolata’s case the model of Magdalene also showed her that in order to be powerful, a woman did not need to act in a hidden, manipulative way, as she had learned from her childhood, but could be her own center.

Grounding: Restoring the Broken Connection to Mother Earth Even if they experienced Mother Earth as a divine, powerful, nurturing being, pilgrims sometimes mentioned that the Earth had been injured in ways similar to those in which women had been wounded. The pilgrims interpreted the human domination of nature as yet another sign of the patriarchal domination

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of the Feminine. As we have seen, for the pilgrims Yahweh’s curse on mankind after the fall also involved the human struggle against nature. Just as the curse of Eve needed to be reversed, so this struggle should be transformed into a life in harmony with Mother Earth. As Gianmichele said about his experience in Legambiente, the pilgrims thought that humans would not change their attitude of domination and exploitation unless they recognized the sacrality of Mother Earth and came to consider themselves her children. People harmed the environment because they saw it separate from them; their connection with Mother Earth had been broken, so they could no longer feel supported by her nurturing energy. Healing the wounds inflicted by humans on the environment could only come after humans became aware of their connection with Mother Earth. This reconnection would help the environment, because people would be more ecologically aware, and it would help people to feel nurtured by Mother Earth, grounded and more in touch with their feminine sides. Carme, one of the youngest pilgrims in Dana’s group, said that when she offered her blood she was nurturing the Earth with something her body produced naturally, just as the Earth had always nourished her. The pilgrims saw this reciprocity that honored the Earth’s sacrality and power as the opposite of domination and exploitation. One of the results of the offering was that women experienced a sense of “grounding,”12 of “being in the here and now,” full of energy, active and effective. It is not easy to determine what grounding or being grounded involved. Pilgrims told me that the offering made them feel more connected with Mother Earth and supported by her on both physical and emotional levels. This in turn made them feel stronger physically and also allowed them to rely on their inner forces to express and achieve what they really wanted in the external world. A secondary effect of this grounding experience was sincerity. As Shuttle and Redgrove put it in their influential book: “There is another way of looking at the disastrous events of the period. Suppose that society is a lie, and the period is a moment of truth which will not sustain lies.”13 In Dana’s words, the menstruation messenger arrived once a month and gave each woman a brief and concrete report about her present situation, confronting her with all the difficulties and the pain the woman had tried to explain away. Under the influence of the powerful energy of the period, a woman could no longer behave as the good girl she was expected to be but had to face her dark side, with all the aspects she had tried to ignore. In the pilgrims’ accounts, Magdalene’s power and the energy of menstruation brought women back to earth. Menstrual blood also seemed to create a sense of greater ownership and connection with a particular place. The experience of being grounded brought with it a sense of presence and awareness, but also seemed to make the person recognize and face concrete problems

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and obstacles. Immacolata described her feelings on visiting the SainteBaume and the relationship between the power of the Earth, the Goddess and Mary Magdalene: “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 actually generative force that Magdalene brought with her. Yes, a strong moral and spiritual power, you know, but really the power of [being a] woman” (April 8, 2005). Women reported that when they offered the blood near their houses they felt as if they were marking their territory. However, Lara Owen referred to the offering in these terms: It was a blessing, and it was also to do with putting my cells on the earth around where I lived and that idea I remember was from Hallie Igleheart Austen, from one of the women I interviewed [for her book] . . . she said that she thought that when a woman put her blood into the earth, it was the fastest way for her to ground [herself] if she was moving to another place. Your cells are in that earth, your blood is in that earth and so you have an energetic connection to the earth. (May 28, 2005) Dana emphasized that women should use the days of their period to rest, gather new energy for the following cycle and allow themselves to check whether everything was all right in their lives. But it was hard for pilgrims to use menstrual insights in their everyday lives. What seemed easy in the wilderness was difficult to put into practice in the civilized world. Ruth, one of the younger pilgrims from Dana’s group, put it this way: “Something that I notice more and more is a phrase that I keep repeating. I believe that menstruation makes us women more authentic, if we want to be. Menstruation is something that allows you to be very real with yourself and with others [she laughs]. Of course, if you are not honest with yourself to begin with you cannot bring this authenticity out” (May 16, 2005). Ruth was one of the women who began to offer her menstrual blood to the Earth regularly on her return from the pilgrimage. This petite Catalan woman with curly red hair and shiny brown eyes looked like a gentle fairy. She had an MA in art therapy and worked as a therapist in Barcelona. Ruth was born shortly before Franco’s death into a family in the town of Vic, one of the strongholds of Catholic Catalan culture. Like her two elder sisters, she attended a Catholic school. Unlike them, and thanks to the post-Franco reforms, Ruth attended mixed-sex classes and was not obliged to wear a uniform. She refused to be confirmed, and her parents accepted her decision without question. Ruth’s interest in spiritual

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themes developed in relation to health problems from the age of seventeen. When, at the age of twenty, Ruth was diagnosed with cancerous cells on her womb, she decided to postpone the operation and try first to heal herself with acupuncture and homeopathy. Her doctor criticized her and refused to recognize the efficacy of the treatment even when the cells finally disappeared. Ruth described this moment as a turning point in her life. She felt that the therapies she had tried had helped her to dissolve important internal blockages and that she now needed to be single. After a ten-year relationship, she separated from her boyfriend at the age of twenty-eight. During an art therapy workshop she made friends with Carme and heard about the Goddess Wood. At the start of the pilgrimage she did not know Dana and knew practically nothing about Mary Magdalene, but liked the idea of traveling with Carme and a group of like-minded women. Instead of asking Estrella for advice as other pilgrims had done, Ruth developed her own way of offering her blood. Even in the winter, she took off her underpants and sat down in the woods with her skirt around her, letting her blood flow out, feeling the contact with the Mother. When she did not find the time to go to the woods, she squeezed the sanitary towels in water and gave her blood to her plants. Another offering consisted in urinating directly on the ground when menstruating. Ruth had always had a regular menstrual cycle and her periods were heavy and painful. Like other women from Dana’s group she felt the need to emphasize that she had never experienced her period as something traumatic, but she admitted that she had seen it as a nuisance. This perspective changed after the pilgrimage. Whenever Ruth went to a wood for the offering she felt a sense of independence, as if she were in a place beyond the limits of society. After the pilgrimage, when I had my period I often went to the woods and made offerings. I like doing it, because more and more this amazing wildness comes out of me [me sale un salvajote increíble]. I am very happy and have a great time. The last time it was like, I felt as if I had not yet been civilized, it was very funny. I was there with my small female dog and it was great because she had a very protective attitude towards me. There was a moment where I was seated on a rock, feeling that rock there a lot, I needed it, you know. And normally she [the dog] is always wandering around the wood and I always have to call her. But this time I put myself in a certain position and she sat down at my side, like a sphinx, as if she was controlling everything. And at a certain moment she even went: “Grrrrr!” [she laughs]. (May 16, 2005) This wildness Ruth referred to was linked to a sense of deep connection with the element earth. The need to offer the blood in a wild place and the sense of being far from civilization also emerged from Lara’s account:

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I liked to go somewhere wild, and feel the connection with nature. It felt a little dangerous sometimes. It was such a powerful act I would get a bit nervous, as if by doing it I was connecting with something so ancient and primitive that it even startled my own civilized self. There’s an element of the primitive aspect of humanity which we feel we cannot control, and we are culturally addicted to control, it makes us feel safe. Menstruation is this messy and predictably unpredictable part of being a woman. Even though I knew this and analyzed it within myself, I would still feel this flicker of fear sometimes when I was bleeding onto the earth. That it was a transgression of what a civilized person would do. (May 28, 2005) In the pilgrims’ words, most women seemed to have lost their connection to their primitive, earthy part and did not receive the nurturing energy from Mother Earth any longer. Ruth said that she needed to feel the contact with the stone. She described herself as someone who tended to be “outside the body” and needed regular grounding14 in order to function in everyday life. When she offered her blood she asked for Earth and felt that she was inhabiting her body in a more complete way. In Ruth’s words, Magdalene was a reference figure for the process of grounding, A woman very faithful to what she felt and able to free herself from the social conditioning related to the historical moment. She was in a way a woman with presence, with that rootedness that I am looking for and that I need . . . Magdalene had a kind of love, giving herself to others without getting lost. I believe that this is slightly my Achilles’ heel and also that of many women: to give of yourself15 and be able to give love without losing yourself or choosing not to give love because we fear losing touch with ourselves. (May 16, 2005) For Carme, a Catalan teacher in her late twenties, the offering of menstrual blood connected her with the Earth. She spoke of a seed, as Susanna had about offering her blood in the cave of the Sainte-Baume: “[The offering] makes you feel conscious of the importance of menstruation and of the fact that it can be important for somebody, in this case for the Earth. And realize that this will be like my footprint, my seed, not the seed of a peach or of a tree, but my seed, how she [Mother Earth] sees me” (March 11, 2005). Estrella had a sort of map of all the places where she had offered her blood. When she was in a place she felt to be powerful and have a special meaning, she offered her blood there if she was menstruating or she offered some drops of a dilution of her blood, which she always carried with her on trips. It seemed as if

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she wanted to mark these places. Her blood allowed her to create a permanent connection to these spots as if she had created a blood alliance with each place and could benefit from its energy whenever she needed to.

William’s Coming into the World For many pilgrims the ability to connect with Mother Earth, to feel grounded and at home on this planet, was related to the Feminine. To Lynn’s husband William, a retired university English professor from Roger’s group, Magdalene was particularly important in this sense. William lived in West Virginia with his second wife Lynn and was in his late sixties. This tall straight man with his white hair and round glasses reminded me of some pictures of the older Carl Jung. William’s parents had left the Midwest immediately after their marriage, maintaining little contact with their families, and William was born in Los Angeles. William’s father was an atheist who discouraged his wife from attending church even on Christmas. William was fairly certain that they did not baptize him. Due to his paternal grandmother’s poor health, William’s own father had been brought up by an uncle who apparently abused him. William’s paternal great uncle founded one of the country’s first radio ministries and later a well known Protestant seminary. When William was sixteen years old, he began reading about Eastern philosophies and seeking out teachers of Eastern spiritual disciplines. He studied English literature at UCLA and in his twenties was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Missisippi. He married his childhood sweetheart in 1958 and moved to Colorado, and they had two children. In 1965 the family moved to West Virginia, where William started to teach. The couple divorced in 1973, and a year later William fell in love with Lynn, a former student. They married some years later and together raised the children from their respective marriages. William’s researches led him to Buddhism, Sufism, New Age experiential workshops, and eventually to the workshops about masculinity run by Robert Bly. In 1990, William founded a men’s group with some friends and kept attending it for years. William and Lynn had attended Roger’s workshops and signed up for the pilgrimage eager for their first holiday after years of caring for their elderly parents. When I asked William if he knew anything about Mary Magdalene before the trip, he said: Yes, I did. It seemed kind of fitting. If you go to a Sufi teacher and ask for some kind of guidance the first thing they ask is: “What’s your affliction?” And so they tell you the teaching. My problem and life-long affliction is an ill-at-easeness in the world. Being uncomfortable and

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not here. Therapists would call it schizoid, always jumping away from the present and into my head. My path has not been trascendent, it has not been to separate myself from the sensuous world, but to connect with it. The Magdalene is for me a kind of embodiment of the sensuous Feminine that I am interested in: in colors, in architecture, in nature, the body of the world. Just the whole sensuous passion of life which is not natural to me. So that’s what’s behind this trip. (October 6, 2005) Even for men, who do not menstruate, Magdalene was a helper in the process of grounding. If pilgrimage was a way to contact divine forces, for William it did not mean renouncing his body and his attachment to this world in the ascetic Christian sense; on the contrary, for him it was a way to connect with the body and this world, with the here and now: There’s a book called ‘On Having No Head,’16 about a transcendent experience in the Himalayas. It’s an account of a man who lost all sense of himself; he felt as if everything about him, his entire physical being, had disappeared, everything except his consciousness. When people talk about the enlightenment experience they talk of that. But I had just the opposite experience. I was on a beach in Maryland, Bethany Beach it was called. Interestingly enough, I hadn’t put this together [the relation between Mary Magdalene and Bethany]. I was sitting there by myself and the tide was coming in and out. People often feel a largeness of Being in such scenes. They feel themselves transported into nature. [I had] exactly the opposite feeling. Instead of transcending the moment and fusing myself with the cosmos, I felt suddenly absolutely that I was there. For one moment I was at one place, one point of time, it would never be the same again and it was like rooting myself in the physical universe. In the whole history of the universe, in this spot, at this moment, I am. And I always will have been. It was as if I had notified the mother ship: “I have landed, I have arrived, I have come into the world.” I think from that moment, I began to have some idea about what my spiritual path needed to be—a path not of transcendence, but one of incarnation. (October 6, 2005) Leonard, the Liberal Catholic priest, related a similar experience: It has always been that, when I was younger I viewed spirituality as something higher, above who I was and now as I am getting older I am beginning to appreciate the feminine. I’m now more able to see that spirituality is right here and now on this earth and in this body and that if you are not able to realize it here, then you will never find it anywhere

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else you should go. Embracing the feminine is for me part of that process of not trying to get somewhere else to find it, but to embrace it right in that moment, to do it right here. For me this is really fulfilling, has a lot of meaning for me. (October 5, 2005) Antònia, whose difficulties in living out her Feminine were described earlier, also told me about her tendency to “fly away” and dwell with her spirit outside her physical body. Like William, who spoke of coming into the world and referred to a space ship and to landing, Antònia referred to a landing strip. After a heart attack in 1995, William passed through a period of crisis and felt nurtured by authors who described similar situations. He discovered that writing down his experiences helped him out of the crisis. He said, “as a consequence, my spiritual path of incarnation became one of coming into the world by writing.” For William, coming back to the world brought with it the courage to be himself, no matter what the surrounding society thought. Some years before the pilgrimage in 2005, William felt “an impulse to declare himself.” Influenced by Jenny Joseph’s well-known poem about her intention to drop all conformity to convention in old age, William showed the outside world that he had “come into the world” by wearing a particular hat. It’s all about coming into the world, finally being at home here, doing what you want and being who you are. A couple of years ago, I did not typically wear the hat you’ve seen me wearing on this trip. In West Virginia, men wear caps, like baseball caps, not hats. But I wanted to wear my hat, so I finally did. The second day I was wearing it, I was in a doctor’s office when I became aware that an old crusty-looking guy was checking me out. I inwardly winced a little, imagining him thinking something unpleasantly judgmental, when he caught my eye and said “Nice hat.” I was surprised and pleased. It seemed a blessing. (October 6, 2005) William wore this same hat when the pilgrims visited the mental hospital where Van Gogh lived in Saint-Remy en Provence shortly before he died: As I was leaving the little Van Gogh museum in the hospital, feeling connected again to Van Gogh as I had been forty years ago, I saw five patients and their attendants coming toward me on the path. As they came toward me, one of the patients pulled away and came forward with his hand out. When I reached out to shake his hand, he leaned over to me and said quietly, “Beau chapeau” [nice hat]. Once again, it seemed a blessing, and as I told Margot yesterday, I began filling up anew with writing projects I was eager to start. And I realized then that the

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pilgrimage for me had come to fruition in an unexpected place and way. I once again felt a renewed purpose in my life that had seeped away months ago. (October 6, 2005) William’s account as well as other episodes of healing that did not take place in a specific, delimitated ritual context, show that there is a blurry boundary between ordinary and ritual acts during the pilgrimage. The pilgrims considered the whole pilgrimage as a rite of passage, and this implied that even apparently ordinary events such as commentaries of people not belonging to the group, objects bought in a shop or sign posts encountered on their way were part of a ritual process and could therefore bring about moments of insight or provoke healing experiences. The capacity for being oneself, being grounded, and no longer having to demonstrate anything appeared to be in some way linked to maturity, to being an old man or woman, as Jenny Joseph (1961) says in the poem “Warning” that William referred to.17 This poem would have made a good introduction to the ceremony of initiation to menopause described below organized by Dana on the last night of the pilgrimage, during which Clara told the initiated women that as crones they did not have to prove anything to anybody ever again. As William discovered when reading an article, being a crone meant giving up on trying to please others, but this did not happen overnight: So I’d had my pilgrimage moment and I was entirely satisfied. A day or two later, as we were leaving Le-Puy for a visit to the Black Madonna at Saugues, I glanced through Caduceus, a magazine Roger had left on the bus for us, and found an article by Marion Woodman, “Crone,” in which she talks about a promise she’d made to herself as she walked across the lawn to her graduation ceremony. “I am not going to reach 80 years old,” she said to herself, “and think that I haven’t lived my own life.” And yet as she acknowledges in the article, when she turned 40 she realized that she still hadn’t done it. She looked at what she was wearing, and concluded “I am still living with the images other people have of what I ought to be; I am pleasing them. I am not living my own reality.” She hadn’t yet decided to wear purple. It was as if she had underscored my experience. “Good!” I thought. “How much validation does a guy need?” (Email, January 7, 2006) As we will see in the next chapter, the image of the crone mentioned by William—the old wise woman also identified as the menopausal woman—was an important figure for the pilgrims. She represented a kind of woman denigrated by society who needed to be restored to her true importance, but she was also related to the dark side of the Feminine and its destructive power.

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In the pilgrims’s narratives about their wounds and the healing process fostered by the pilgrimage, we can see a “body at war with itself,”18 struggling to come to terms with imposed patriarchal notions. The pilgrims perceived the current social order as negating the validity of experiences such as vulnerability, anger, or destructiveness and associated or identified these negated experiences as darkness. Addressing and expressing this darkness through their rituals, the pilgrims tried to deal with conflicts and wounds they felt were not addressed by existing institutions or religious traditions.

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Embracing The Darkness

As we have seen, the pilgrims criticized the Church’s rejection of the power of the Feminine and related this to the patriarchal condemnation and refusal of the dark side. In this chapter we will explore more in detail the pilgrims’ idea of darkness and its association with menstruation and menopause. From the pilgrims’ point of view, menstruation, related to life and death, could bring about creativity but also anger and destructivity; it seemed to allow and often even force female pilgrims to face their inner darkness and come to terms with it. Like menstruation, Mary Magdalene too was ambiguously related both to life (Christ’s resurrection) and death (Christ’s crucifixion), and the pilgrims held that she could help them to be in touch with darkness without fearing it. For the pilgrims, menstruation played an important role in women’s relationship with their dark side, and for this reason they chose to take time out to experience it. If menstruation represented for the pilgrims a “little retreat” every month, menopause was a “big retreat” that allowed each woman to access the status of crone. To celebrate this passage, Dana’s pilgrims organized a rite.

Dana’s Ritual of the Last Blood By the seventh day of their trip, Catalan and Spanish pilgrims had already visited Marseille, the Sainte-Baume, and the other places related to the legendary journey of Mary Magdalene in Provence: Saint-Maximin and Les-SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer. On that day they traveled back to Catalonia and spent the night near Besalú, where Dana used to live in the summer. For the final two days, the group prepared to perform the last important ritual of the pilgrimage, the ceremony of the last blood. Women from the Goddess Wood had been looking forward to it, wondering how and when it would take place. During the penultimate day they visited a little chapel in Maià de Montcal dedicated to Mary Magdalene, at the top of a little hill. When they came back to Dana’s house in the late afternoon the preparations for the ceremony began. Six women would be initiated: Lorena, the eldest of the group; the rational Felicia; 217

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the enthusiastic Antònia; Marie France, a university professor with a French background; Sandra, an artist from the Basque country; and Cristina, a dermatologist from Barcelona who also worked as a healer. In order to participate in the ceremony, women had to have had their last period more than a year before. Dana, who was entering perimenopause, could not participate because she had lost some blood some months before. Another Catalan woman was in a similar situation. Like Dana she would have loved to be initiated but, as a consequence of hormone therapy prescribed by her doctor, her cycle had become irregular. Regretting her decision, she had stopped the treatment but still had lost some blood some months before. Even though this was never made explicit by Dana, there was a general rejection in her group of hormone therapy. Hormones were said to cause artificial periods and to prevent the woman from passing through the initiatory phase of menopause, during which she had the opportunity to face all the things left unresolved in her life. Since Dana had not started menopause, she could not officiate in the ritual. Instead, Clara performed it, helped by Lourdes, a new member who had joined the group especially for the ceremony. Lourdes was a rather small woman with long white hair and blue eyes. She lived in a rural house and was known as the guardian of a small chapel (ermita) that was said to be a power place of the region. There she occasionally organized shamanic ceremonies with sacred plants (marihuana, peyote, ayahuasca), sweat lodges, or other kind of workshops. Every year Lourdes was visited by what she described as indigenous shamans and also by the abuela Margarita, the Mexican shaman woman who had taught Estrella to offer her menstrual blood to the Earth. She herself specialized in the ritual use of the sacred plant called la Santa María (cannabis) that would be used for the ceremony. Before retiring to a room to talk about their life experiences, each of the six women to be initiated had chosen two women to assist them during the ceremony, referred to by the archaic term of doncellas (damsels). As sunset approached, the rest of the pilgrims were outside in the garden singing and preparing crowns made of branches, flowers, and berries, which the six women would wear after the initiation. While Dana prepared the marihuana cigarettes to be smoked during the first phase of the ceremony, Puri, the doctor, was giving individual laser treatment to pilgrims complaining about aches or energy blockages. Some time later, Dana told me why she had decided not to officiate the ceremony of menopause. The year before she had performed a somewhat different ritual to initiate Clara, and the following month her own period did not arrive. It seemed to Dana as if the ritual had caused her to enter the menopausal process prematurely. She had menstruated since but never with the same regularity as before. She now felt that it had not been appropriate to initiate a woman into the mysteries of menopause without having entered it herself, and had therefore asked Lourdes to help Clara.

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Santa María, the Abused Sacred Plant When darkness had fallen, all the women met in a large room in Dana’s house. There Clara and Lourdes had prepared an altar toward the end of the rectangular room, just in front of the place where Clara, Lourdes, Dana, and Puri were sitting. The other women sat down on the ground along the sides of the room. On the longer wall just to the right of the altar sat the six women, a damsel on each side of them. I was one of the few women who attended the entire ritual, because I was neither a damsel nor a crone-to-be. During this first part of the ceremony of the last blood all the women were to sit and listen to Dana and the others explaining the basic features of the ritual, and then smoke the sacred plant of Santa María together in order to prepare themselves for this rite of passage.1 Dana introduced Lourdes as a priestess of the Goddess,2 like Dana, Puri, and Clara, and an expert in the tradition of the Santa María. Lourdes asked if there was anybody in the room who had never worked with the Santa María before, meaning women who had never smoked marihuana. Some of the pilgrims timidly raised their hands. Lourdes explained that the ceremony of the Santa María was a “transmission of feminine energy” that “awakened the memory.” Pilgrims were taught that, in a ceremonial context, the cigarettes containing pure cannabis leaves should not be called joints (porros), which she considered a denigrating term, but rather pitos. Lourdes said that cannabis, like tobacco, was a sacred plant that should be smoked with an attitude of respect and reverence, if one wanted to benefit from its power. Unfortunately both plants were now commonly smoked without any respect and often mixed with chemicals. This plant had been systematically disparaged because it transmitted the wisdom of women. Santa María had been abused exactly as women had been abused throughout the centuries, and it was very difficult to assert her power and to get people to respect her. Nowadays joints were smoked like cigarettes for pure pleasure, without any respect. The plants, she explained, offered their power only to those who treated them with respect. If this was not the case, the energetic vibration of the plant could not rise and only a very low energy became available through smoking it. The more one invoked the spirit and the power of the plant, the more its vibration rose and passed on its teaching to the person. Without a proper invocation, the effect of the plant remained at a vegetal level and the spiritual teaching was lost. It was important, Lourdes said, that sacred plants like tobacco and Santa María reclaimed their rightful places and that the Santa María be recognized again as la transmisora de las enseñanzas de la Diosa (the vehicle for the teachings of the Goddess). The pitos were distributed among the group and were to be shared in groups of four. When each woman received the pito, she should invoke the sun, the moon, and the stars before beginning to smoke. While pitos were being lit and smoked, Lourdes shared her experience of the Santa María and handed out

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lyrics of Brazilian songs she had learned when initiated by a Brazilian teacher into the Santa María tradition. When Lourdes lit her pito, she said: “We offer the energy of this sacred plant for the well-being of all beings.” The women started singing and smoking. They had dressed up for the occasion and put on makeup. All were wearing pareos (lengths of cloth wrapped around the hips as a skirt) without underpants and as it became very hot inside the room some of them took off their blouses, showing their bras or bare breasts. Playing maracas, they sang Brazilian songs led by Lourdes, sometimes bursting into loud laughter. Lorena, the eldest, who had never smoked cannabis before, suddenly felt sick and Dana and Puri tried to help her. After half an hour of singing and smoking, Dana called for silence and asked women to sit in a comfortable position for a silent meditation of five minutes. Then the women who were to be initiated were asked to leave the room and wait in the garden, while the others learned how to help during the initiation rite. It seemed to be important to keep the ritual sequence a surprise for those who would pass through it.

Becoming Part of the Dragonfly Clan The ritual of the last blood would allow women who did not menstruate any longer to be initiated into their new status of ancianas (crones) and to understand the meaning and importance of this stage of a woman’s life. Dana explained that this was the final part of the group’s work with the blood. She made an invocation, asking to be able to get over all obstacles, and then invited women to say a Hail Mary, following a modified version.3 She then called all the divinities she wanted to be present at the ritual: the Chinese Tara, the Immaculate Conception, Saint Anne, Mary Magdalene, the three Maries, Sara the Kali, Notre-Dame de la Garde (Marseille), Notre-Dame de Confession (Marseille), Artemis, Cybeles, and Isis, describing these divinities as the different faces of the Goddess of the pilgrimage. Then she invoked some of the Catalan Virgins venerated in the surrounding area. As we have seen previously, the different names of the Virgin Mary were considered by pilgrims to be designating different goddesses, each with her own characteristics and related to a certain place or a certain phase of the life of Mary. Dana introduced Lourdes and Clara as “ovarian sisters” because they both had been present at the same initiation ceremony to menopause in the past. For this reason, they were particularly appropriate for this work. Clara and Lourdes invoked all the ancianas who had entered menopause and passed through this or similar rituals before them. These crones should guide their work and be present during the ceremony, and among the ones invoked was abuela Margarita. The six women to be initiated left the room, accompanied by their damsels and Dana. Sitting in the garden around a fire, each of the six women would recount the story of her first menstruation and then speak freely about her life.

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She should prepare to enter a new phase in her life, by focusing on and acknowledging the life she was leaving behind. Lorena, the eldest, would go in first, along with her damsels. In the room the other women, myself included, followed Clara’s instructions. In the middle a sort of bed had been created where the woman would lie down so her head was just before the altar. The other women would sit around the area where the woman was to be initiated and should take off the pareo and use part of it as a cushion for sitting on the ground. The remaining part of the pareo would be used as a massage cloth on the initiate’s body, so that our hands would not touch her directly. It would be better, Clara said, if women displayed their vaginas, but if they did not feel comfortable doing so, it was not required. Then Clara gave some oil to each woman and explained that she had prepared it herself. It contained almond oil as a base, mixed with sesame oil, another oil obtained from Indian seeds, another one from Egyptian seeds and a special essence from Jerusalem. The air filled with a strong fragrance, and the prevalent smell was that of mustard seeds. Because the eldest women, Lorena, still felt sick from smoking Santa María, Clara chose to begin the initiation straight away. Instead of explaining what the women should do before the ritual, as Dana usually did, Clara gave directions and explanations during the first initiation. Lorena lay down naked on the ceremonial bed and Clara began to massage her, explaining that women should begin to massage Lorena all over the body. The following description paraphrases Clara’s words, following their exact sequence: this massage was not meant to pass on energy to the woman; rather it was a gift of fecund women to a woman who had already offered her femininity to the Earth when menstruating. The dragon would guard the offered femininity as a treasure. This dragon represented the abundance of the Earth and nourished the wombs of women, so that they were never in need of anything. When women stopped nurturing the Earth with their menstrual blood, it was because when they entered menopause they became part of the Earth itself. The symbol of the women after menopause was the dragonfly, symbolizing their capacity to fly. Then Clara told the story of the coyote and the dragon. One day the coyote met the dragon and asked him to demonstrate that he really was a magic dragon, as everybody said he was. Immediately the dragon turned into a dragonfly to prove his magical power, and the coyote ate him. This story demonstrated an important lesson for menopausal women: they did not need to demonstrate anything anymore. They had done their part. “Now we can fly,” Clara said. “We do not need anything.” At this point Lorena said to the massaging pilgrims, “Hey, touch the chichi [familiar word for vagina] too, it doesn’t bite!,” and everybody laughed. While Puri massaged Lorena’s feet, Lourdes held and caressed Lorena’s head and Clara and the others massaged her whole body, Clara explained that Lorena was “recovering all her memories in this first phase.”

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At this point Lorena complained that Clara was addressing the other women with her explanations, rather than her. She felt the need for more attention. Clara asked Lorena to forgive her and from that point on, addressed Lorena directly. In the second phase of the initiation rite, women began to sing and Clara took the dilution obtained from all the pilgrims’ blood and put some of it on Lorena’s belly, outlining the form of the female reproductive organs. Then the other women took flower petals and put them on the outline of the uterus and ovaries and on the vagina. Because of the oil the petals stuck to Lorena’s body and took the shape of an outward representation of her inner organs. In the third phase, the pilgrims kept singing. Lorena was “closed” by tying her legs together, so that her energy would not go out through her vagina any longer, but rather upward from the sexual organs toward the belly and the heart. Then Lorena was invited to sit up and look at her body, seeing the petals adorning the representation of her reproductive parts. Her two damsels then helped her to stand up and covered her with her pareo. They led her toward the altar where Lourdes and Clara crowned her with the garland of twigs and flowers and put on her a special rosary created by Clara (see figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Maria Antònia’s rosary made by Clara, with a dragonfly pendant. Photo by Maria Antònia Segalés, with her permission.

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This rosary had a dragonfly pendant, replacing the cross and each woman received a slightly different one. Then the two damsels held up a mirror for Lorena to see herself while Estrella took a picture of her. Finally Lorena went around giving every woman a long hug and telling her something personal, and everybody danced and sang until she sat down to rest. The next woman to be initiated was Felicia. This time there were more women massaging, because Lorena’s damsels had now joined the group. Everybody now knew what to do and Clara could focus on Felicia, telling her the story of the dragonfly and inviting her to overcome the need to demonstrate things to other people. After Felicia had been crowned and given her rosary, she hugged everybody and whispered something in each person’s ear. When she came to me, I felt her strong arms holding me, and she said to me: “May you understand that Mary Magdalene is not only in the head, but also in the heart, the guts, and the feet.” With every new woman that arrived, there were more women massaging and singing. Clara told every initiated woman some personal things related to her alone and kept repeating the importance of the teaching of the dragonfly. Every woman received a different rosary and looked both astonished and moved when she saw her image in the mirror. Each initiation lasted about forty-five minutes. After the fourth initiation, some of the women who had been massaging from the beginning left the room to get some fresh air. For the last two women there were too many women massaging, and some left the ceremonial bed to sit or lie down and have a rest. By two in the morning, all six women had been crowned and the last part of the ceremony, the sharing, could begin. All pilgrims sat down to listen to the words of the newly initiated wise women (sabias), who were welcomed by Clara as part of the clan of the dragonfly. The six women were sitting in a circle in the center of the room and surrounded by all the others forming a larger circle. In the middle of the two concentric circles there was a candle. Lorena, the eldest, said that it was worth having all her years to live this amazing experience: “It was the most beautiful moment of my life, I felt every woman, I saw a lot and I felt a lot. I came to understand that I can do what I want to, without asking permission of anybody as I am my own master.” Felicia said that she felt all these hands on her body and could not say where they went, as they seemed to enter her body and massage her organs as well. She suggested that the other wise women remember that moment whenever they felt doubts and concluded: “I felt at home, a thing that is very difficult for me.” Cristina, the dermatologist, said that she could not describe what she had experienced, as she was so moved, so she just thanked the women for all that beauty and for “making me feel proud to be a woman.” Sandra, the Basque artist, said that in the beginning she had felt like a child, and that the ritual had helped her to integrate her child, her woman and her grandmother as three aspects all forming part of her. She felt proud to be a woman as well.

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Antònia enthusiastically recounted that with her eyes closed during the ceremony she had seen the Goddess descending on her and on the other women and illuminating the whole room with a white light. Marie-France, the French university professor who had expressed the difficulty of overcoming her skepticism during the whole trip, admitted that at some moments she had been thinking, “What is a girl like me doing in a place like this?” But that then she felt all the women massaging her and felt welcomed and sheltered. Later, when she hugged every woman, she had felt a common essence among them, but at the same time perceived every woman as different. To conclude the ceremony, Lourdes gave the six women some chocolate. Dana thanked all the divinities that had been invoked and present during the rite and thanked all the women, emphasizing the importance of the tribe.

Contemporary Menstrual Rites of Passage The need for modern rites of passage in contemporary American society has been analyzed by Ronald Grimes, who points to the emergence of alternative ritual entrepreneurs that offer to create rites of passage appropriate for individuals or situations.4 He observes that when inventing ritual one cannot create out of nothing but always must use preexisting cultural and religious material. Grimes invites us to think of traditional rituals not as fixed and invariable but rather as structures that must change and adapt in order to survive.5 For him a rite of passage is “a set of symbol-laden actions by means of which one passes through a dangerous zone, negotiating it safely and memorably.”6 I agree that one of the key elements of rites of passage is that of transformation. Here I will refer in particular to the initiation into menopause but, as I already suggested, it is useful to consider the entire pilgrimage as a transformative rite of passage that for many pilgrims marked a before and after in their lives. Social scientists describing rites of passage in Neopagan or New Age groups emphasize their self-conscious aspect.7 Participants mostly knew not only what would take place during the ritual but also the symbolic meaning ascribed to it and the effects it was supposed to have on them. A problem with these analyses is that they often focus only on the ritual’s structure as the described by the leader and then enacted. But if one attends to the accounts of the participants one comes to realize that they often forget what the ritual is meant to do and how they are supposed to do it and end up adapting it to their own situation and needs. Crafted rites of passage work not only as a “type of language” to express “internal spiritual-emotional resources tied to our true identities but frequently unknown and undeveloped,”8 they also foster the emergency of a new social identity.

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As we will see in the final chapter when considering the changes that took place in the pilgrims’ life, Antònia felt that thanks to the pilgrimage she had acquired a new sense of herself as a woman that affected her work and her relationship to men. Other pilgrims too experienced changes in how they related to others and interpreted their role in society. The association of symbols and the sequences they imagined and enacted during the rituals offered them a coherent system for experiencing the world in a new way and acting upon a social order they experienced as oppressive. One of the aims of the ritual was to show women that no longer being fertile did not mean being weak and insecure. This transformative process was particularly effective for the crones but affected other participants as well. Thanks to the crones, the younger women saw for themselves a future with different and positive female roles. Estrella photographed each woman once she was crowned and later prepared an album for each woman as a souvenir of the ritual. She had been chosen as a damsel by Sandra, the Basque artist: I was the godmother of Sandra. I felt as if I were her mother and she was like a baby because she was being reborn. It was really beautiful. During the ritual I stayed in one part of myself and then acting as a godmother I put myself into another part I did not know . . . I liked this ritual better than the one of the offering . . . because I saw that the ritual of menopause had an effect. To me it was very healing to see how they came out with all that power. I felt that female dignity was being healed. Before that moment I saw women in their fifties as housewives because this is what is sold to you. I saw them as insecure, I had never seen an alternative. When I saw them I felt that all the cells of my body began to burn [she passed her hands over her body]. There I saw the dignity of being a woman, even if you are older and can no longer have children. (. . .) For me the pilgrimage was the ritual of menopause. (September 18, 2005) Michael Houseman9 pointed out that the empathy and the feelings expressed by the participants in a menarche ritual seemed to be as important as any other ritual action. This seemed to be true for Dana’s pilgrims as well. In fact the two moments of sharing their feelings about their experiences, the former among the six women and the latter among the whole group, were an integral part of the ritual. This was the only ritual where there was a surprise and neither the younger nor the elder women knew what would happen. This was also the only ritual that was referred to explicitly as a rite of passage and not only as an initiation ritual, as the offering of the blood in the wood had been called. This ritual was also the only time where Dana decided to make use of a psychotropic plant to foster a different kind of consciousness that might allow women to transcend the limits of rational thinking. As we have seen, in the pilgrims’

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terms, the plant used had something in common with the crones. Dana observed that Western society did not acknowledge the importance of older women and as with the Santa María, ignored their sacredness, wisdom, and paramount social importance as advice-givers and healers. The damsels accompanied and helped during the process and the term used to describe them referred to bridesmaids, but the damsels also were like godmothers. In fact when talking about this ritual later, some pilgrims who had been damsels actually used the word madrina (godmother), and seemed to have forgotten that Dana had used the term doncella (as in Estrella’s commentary above). Antònia told me about her experience during the ritual of the last blood. She had chosen as damsels Mara, who could help her to keep her contact with the Earth during the ritual, and the young, energetic and unpredictable Sol, who lived as a squatter and reminded Antònia of herself as a rebellious and crazy girl: When I went up [to the room where the ritual took place] it was a total apotheosis. There I felt myself queen for a day at all levels. There were so many, how could I say this, many perceptions, feelings, tenderness, love . . . I felt so open, so loved by the others, by the universe, by life. I mean it was so, aaahhh! I was not able, I did not think, I could not think because it was a coming and going of feelings of joy, overwhelming, everything . . . What I experienced was a treasure . . . If there remained something feminine I needed to transform I did it and I believe that it was a total transformation. I felt goddess, queen .  .  . everything .  .  . Something that makes you say: “Wow, this is total fulfillment.” I really believe that the whole pilgrimage in itself [was powerful] but the two culminating moments were [the offering] in the wood and then the ritual of the last blood. (June 4, 2005) As we have seen in Antònia’s case, the damsel could remind the crone of her years as a younger woman and, as if in a set of mirrors, she was accompanied to the altar by a woman representing her. This constant mirroring that happens between the person who is the center of the ritual and the other assisting women has been observed by Houseman10 and works here in a multiple way: Antònia saw herself as a wild young girl reflected in the younger Sol, but she also saw in the grounded Mara the kind of qualities she lacked and wanted to develop in the future. Other pilgrims there told me that seeing the crones they had felt a kind of healing in themselves. For these women who attributed such spiritual importance to the menstrual period, the end of menstruation also had a spiritual dimension. Here again Dana’s pilgrims referred to Native American societies and in particular to Mexican Native groups where elder women were apparently highly respected and treated as wise ones to be consulted on important decisions.

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The figure of the menopausal woman as a wise, powerful figure with a certain freedom and authority inside her social group has been described by anthropologists in some traditional societies. Françoise Héritier has shown that there are contrasting attitudes toward menopausal women in traditional societies and that these tend to be considered as being “no longer women” and therefore closer to men.11 The change of status they undergo after menopause may therefore be ascribed to their closeness to masculinity. Clara told me that she had learned the basic structure of this ceremony from two elder Chichimec women from the zone of Monte Albán (Mexico) who were healers (sanadoras). They explained to her that after giving birth a woman needed to be closed so that the bones that had widened for the occasion could close again. They also told her that something similar could be done to menopausal women and had celebrated such a ceremony to close Clara who had just entered menopause. Clara explained to me that during fertile age a woman was energetically open, ready to welcome a baby inside of her. After menopause the physical and energetic body needed to close, and the ceremony fostered this process of closure. For the ceremony of the last blood Clara used the gestures and structures she learned from the Chichimec women and added some other sequences she had received through channeling (canalizado). When discussing the blood offering in the wood, I pointed to the relationship these women established between menstrual blood and Christ’s blood offered for humanity. The fact that the crones were given a rosary with a dragonfly, instead of Christ on the cross, reinforced this parallel. If menopause could be interpreted as the death of menstruation, then it could be compared to the death of Christ on the cross and the end of his blood-shedding. In this sense the dragonfly refers to death but also to resurrection, being reborn to a new phase of life, having left behind one’s previous self as a woman of child-bearing age. Whereas Mary Magdalene was often referred to during the offering in the wood, in this ritual it was the Virgin Mary who was frequently mentioned and invoked under her different local names. Like the Virgin, the plant of marihuana was referred to as Santa María and the crones were given a rosary strictly related to Mary. Unlike Magdalene, whom the pilgrims related to menstrual blood, the Virgin Mary is perceived in a Catholic context as being virtually bloodless12 and she in fact was a central figure in this ritual celebrating the absence of the menstrual blood flow. In this, as in other Neopagan and New Age menarche rites referred to by Houseman,13 all the women participating identify with a multiplicity of people and models and “the salience” of these rituals derives “less from the singular character of the actions performed, than from the exceptional intentional and emotional sharing their performance entails.”14 They experience a sense of connection with their sisters during the rituals but also with different parts of themselves and with the goddesses they invoke. This process of self-mirroring and the

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creation of a “new embodied ‘knowing-with-herself/knowing-with-others’” that is described “as radically different from mainstream cultural knowledge”15 is particularly evident in the healing Antónia experienced during the outdoor phase of the initiation into menopause. Sitting around a fire in the garden with the crones accompanied by their damsels, Dana explained that before being initiated as crone a menopausal woman is supposed to reconsider her whole life, to heal the parts that have not been healed yet or to complete things left undone. The beginning of menopause, when the period begins to gradually disappear, is supposed to foster an introspective phase in the woman’s life in which she can definitively close unsettled issues from her life as a child, a maiden and a mature woman. She is equally invited by menopause to face whatever inner demons she had tried to escape until that moment, so as to enter the last part of her life purified and at peace. The women in Dana’s group considered that unpleasant symptoms commonly associated with menopause were a consequence of a misconception or even a failure to accept biological reality. If a woman could not face problems during her fertile life, then she would have a difficult time entering menopause. Of course, as we have seen, according to the pilgrims, prolonging menstruation artificially by hormone therapy prevented the proper development of this phase of a woman’s spirituality. Hence the part of the ritual outside, when the women were sitting around the fire with Dana, involved a kind of rapid recapitulation of the women’s lives in order to help them to close or heal certain chapters. By the fire Antònia listened to the other women’s accounts about their first menstruation and their past. Then she had to talk about herself, and because of the Santa María, she talked at length: At a conscious level I cannot tell you what happened. I was there and images were simply coming to me, it was chaotic . . . even if I tried to explain the situation [to the other women in the circle] it was for me as if I were living it . . . I do not know if the others understood anything I said, but I had a great time, full of an internal all-encompassing cheerfulness. I laughed about situations [in my life] that at the time had been pretty complicated, but I was seeing them from another viewpoint . . . [When I was an adolescent] I suffered a lot and felt bad, saying: “Why am I not allowed to do this and that?” But as I was now seeing it from the outside, it was like the movie of my life and so I was able to laugh about the situation . . . I think that I could reconcile a lot with my adolescence . . . that had been very hard because I did not accept my femininity and so obviously everything related to it was hard . . . I think that I really cured my inner little girl. My inner little girl was radiant, she was laughing, yes, yes, she felt liberated. (June 4, 2005)

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Menopause is not necessarily a difficult period for women, and Anne FaustoSterling16 argues that we dispose of no data to support the theory that it is related to serious depression in women. She shows how “the premise that women are by nature abnormal and inherently diseased dominates past research on menstruation and menopause,” and “women are seen as emotional slaves of their reproductive physiologies.”17 She suggests that “the social, life history, and family contexts in which middle-aged women find themselves are more important links to emotional changes occurring during the years of the climacteric.”18 Along these lines, the pilgrims’ ritual helped them to conceptualize menopause not as a disease but as a passage that allowed them to reflect upon their lives and come to terms with problematic individual and social issues.19 The pilgrims refused to consider their female bodies and physiological processes as dysfunctional just because they did not function according to a social system based on gender inequalities and they identified the source of their problems in the religious and social order they had grown up with.

The Genealogy of a Rite of Passage Even as new rites of passage receive increased attention from social scientists and historians of religion20 there are few detailed ethnographic descriptions, especially in the case of rites related to the menstrual cycle. When offering an ethnographic account of these contemporary rituals I think that it is important to focus not only on the description of the ritual sequence and the participants’ discourses during and afterward but also on their way of inserting the ritual events in their life narrative. We should also pay attention to the way in which ritual actors relate to the ritual and its effects some time after it took place. Especially in the context of menstrual rituals it helps if the observer maintains a personal and ongoing relationship with the ritual actors. A delayed blood-rite for adult women in the United States who had not had the opportunity to celebrate their first blood had several elements in common with Dana’s ritual of the last blood. The rite, described by Jone Salomonsen, was performed in a red atmosphere in terms of decoration, food, and drinks, and the women were naked. During this ritual, “after casting the circle and calling the directions,” women listen to the following “story about the first paradise.” Once upon a time men and women lived on different islands. At some point a man on a long visit to the women’s island invites them to join the men’s island. The Moon Goddess tells the women that “to help you remember your origins and common roots, you shall bleed once a month,” and the women thereafter celebrate “the first blood-ritual ever.”21 After listening to this story, women are “put into a bathtub and watered with a red, warm liquid” made of herbs. After “being ‘baptized’” in this way, each

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woman is “sanctified with red ochre” and does the same to the next woman in the circle. She paints red ochre on the area between her navel and her pubic hair, while saying, “This is the blood that brings renewal. This is the blood that brings sustenance. This is the blood that brings life.”22 After this women tell stories about menstruation and learn how to make their own sanitary pads. In both cases, the women passing through the ritual were naked and a story told to them helped them to make sense of the biological event related to the ritual. They were bathed or anointed with a liquid prepared for the occasion and then their reproductive organs were decorated. In both cases, there was a parallel between the ceremony and baptism, and after the ritual there was a reference to a sisterhood based on the presence or absence of menstrual bleeding. There is also a common reference to a myth that helps to make sense of the newly acquired status of menstruating or menopausal woman. Salomonsen also participated in a menarche ceremony of a women’s circle related to Starhawk’s Reclaiming community.23 Reclaiming is a “community of feminist witches” formed in 1979 by Starhawk (Myriam Samos) and Diane Baker, both of whom are from Jewish backgrounds. As Salomonsen points out, Reclaiming’s success is mainly due to Starhawk’s 1979 book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, which is probably the most popular Neopagan handbook. The menarche ritual was the second of that kind performed inside Starhawk’s movement. Nicole, Hera’s daughter, had been the first Reclaiming girl to have a first blood celebration in 1984, and in 1989 Anna’s daughter Sonia had started to bleed. Hera led the ritual and gave it a tripartite structure; she “had learned this ritual structure (separation, transition, reintegration) from reading Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s ‘what’ theory on the essentials of coming of age rituals globally.”24 As we saw earlier, anthropological theories about rites of passage form part of the ideological base of the crafted menstrual rituals. Talking about the ceremony of the last blood described before, Dana emphasized that during all initiation rituals there needed to be a process of death and resurrection, of separating from one’s original group, leaving behind one’s previous status as a fertile woman and taking on a new one. After this central phase, one was reintegrated into the group with the new status of the crone. Dana had reservations about the way Clara performed the ritual, because she had not respected this basic structure: “There must be a farewell to the previous [stage], in a ritual this cannot be omitted. And this did not take place [during the ritual of last blood of the second pilgrimage in 2004], but, well, it went well anyway” (March 3, 2006). Like Dana’s women, the Reclaiming women described by Salomonsen in the late 1980s were gradually creating a new tradition. Starhawk’s movement has attained widespread popularity and it will be interesting to see how women of the movement perform menarche rituals in the future.

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In a later article Salomonsen analyzed the “ethno-methodology of ritual invention in contemporary culture”25 comparing the Pagan Reclaiming menarche ritual above and a new version of the confirmation rite of the First Church of Christ created by William Roberts, Jr. as an “initiation into adulthood.”26 Salomonsen’s comparison, like this study of Magdalene pilgrims, shows that the pilgrims in particular and Neopagans in general have more in common with new Christian religious movements than they are ready to admit.27 Comparing the two rituals the author points out the phases implied in the construction of a new rite of passage. Salomonsen28 refers especially to the menarche ritual in the Reclaiming tradition; the steps she highlights apply also for the development of the two central rituals of the pilgrimage of the blood: the blood offering in the wood and the initiation to menopause. Recognizing a lack of rituals celebrating the importance of menstruation and the importance for each woman to create a physical and spiritual connection with her own blood, Dana and other women of Goddess Wood had started recollecting and offering their menstrual blood on their own. They perceived the importance of creating a communal ritual and the collective transformative potential it might bring about and decided to create one. Having entered menopause Clara also felt the need to be initiated into menopause and asked Dana to envision and perform a ritual for her. After reading extensively about the spiritual role of Mary Magdalene for contemporary women and identifying a link between Magdalene and the importance of menstrual blood, Dana felt that the Magdalene pilgrimage would be the perfect occasion for a communal ritual of offering. Dana and Clara envisioned a general structure of the ritual and decided to celebrate a first communal offering ritual during the first pilgrimage of the blood in 2002. For both the ritual of offering and that of menopause Dana readily admitted having referred to material from the Goddess tradition and from Neopagan websites, but also scholarly texts available in Spanish. Clara drew on her apprenticeship in the Conchero tradition and on other rituals she had heard about during her yearly stays in Mexico. Drawing on their visions, readings, apprenticeship and referring to the individual versions of the ritual of offering and of the last blood they had experienced Dana and Clara created the two communal rituals. Both rituals were described as central to the pilgrimage of the blood that was to be held every second summer; they became constitutive rituals for Goddess Wood members. In accordance with the pilgrims’ view about the importance of ritual creativity and the flexibility of ritual sequences, what became crystallized as ritual was not an exact sequence but a corpus of knowledge regarding the general ritual structure, the theories about the importance and meaning of menstruation and menopause to be explained, the desired outcomes of the ritual and the most important symbols associated with it.

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Like the menarche rituals analyzed by Houseman, the last blood ritual created a “particularly intense intentional and emotional reverberation” that allowed the participants “to experience (each in her own way) that they are more than what they seem to be.”29 An important element of the rites of passage described by anthropologists in traditional societies, Houseman observes, is the kind of “indetermination that characterizes the complexity of the ritual participation.” In the case of menstrual rites of passage this indetermination “no longer depends on the question ‘what are we doing’’ but on a different, more intimate question: ‘who are we’?”30 In Talal Asad’s terms,31 the script dimension of the ritual has lost its importance. The participants’ focus is no longer on the exact execution of a stereotyped ritual behavior but on their sensations and emotions and on the creative ritual acts that derive from them. The pilgrims do what needs to be done but also what they feel is the right thing to do. Yet this focus on the individual needs should not make us forget that their rituals are lived and negotiated in interaction with the other participants and with the divine beings called upon.

The Spiritual Meaning of Menopause In his study about rites of passage Ronald Grimes32 points out that people “often regret their failure to contemplate a birth, celebrate a marriage, mark the arrival of maturity, or enter into the throes of a death.” He also observes that “unattended, a major life passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering social confusion, and twisting the course of the life that follows it.” The crones from Dana’s group expressed their joy at having been offered the possibility to make up for dismissing ritually their menopause through the common ritual during the pilgrimage; premenopausal pilgrims expressed their desire to participate in a similar rite of passage to celebrate their own menopause. A similar desire to celebrate a life passage that had been left unattended33 emerged from the American ritual that was designed to allow adult women to celebrate properly their menarche.34 In the two cases women felt the importance of ritually recognizing the onset or the end of bleeding. Other pilgrims not in Dana’s group expressed to me their regret at not having celebrated their own menarche or menopause and some of them described their personal conceptualizing and ritualizing strategies. In Roger’s group, all of the women had already reached menopause. Margot, the youngest pilgrim, had entered it three years before and felt that with the pilgrimage she made as a gift for her fiftieth birthday she had ended the transitional period linked to her last bleeding and entered a new phase in her life. In her account, many elements mentioned by Dana and Clara about becoming and

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being a crone emerged. Margot’s story also reflects ideas about menstruation and menopause shared by many pilgrims I spoke to. Margot interpreted her experience of menopause not as an isolated event but as the outcome of her whole life story and her relationship with her menstrual cycle. Her experiences and her ideas about menstruation, menopause, and hormone replacement therapy mirror those of many pilgrims and offer an apt conclusion to this section on the ritualization of the menstrual cycle: In terms of experiencing my menstruation, on the whole it was very, very regular, I would often be able to know for myself the moment preceding bleeding. You know, I would know my body was now ready to bleed, so I would often be able to anticipate. I would often bleed at the same time of the month, often around the new moon . . . I had a few dramatic moments leading up to the approach of menopause. I had one period of bleeding for six months nonstop which was very, paaah!!, worrying and draining. And a period where I was in a deep grip of pain and one time fainted and felt: “Oh my God! what’s happening?” And I had tests and they said that it was, you know the beginning of menopause and the doctors were keen for me to get HRT, hormone therapy, and there was no way I was willing to consider that. So I was in homeopathic treatment for a while, and that helped to regulate it. And then one day, I guess three years ago now, I had a very dramatic end to my bleeding. I had another period of bleeding for maybe six weeks and then on the day that this relationship ended, a very deep relationship, I stopped bleeding and didn’t bleed again. So that was quite significant. (October 13, 2005) After her last bleeding, a different phase began for Margot: And then maybe for a year or so after that, I had very powerful sleepless nights, for some time a lot of sweating, a lot of, it felt like really facing demons, you know, it felt like, night after night all my fears were there, all my rages and you know, sometimes I felt I could really tip over the edge into going crazy. But somewhere I was able to just keep facing . . . the fears and the wild, wild, wild, wild torrents and torments of emotions really. So that was very, very powerful at times and sometimes there would be visions, you know, there would be ecstatic times as well, times of feeling immensely expanded by my being. Again I had homeopathy and some help with acupuncture. Then I began to stabilize. And it felt very important to live near nature, you know. I had moved to Scotland by that time and some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I would just go out and lie down on the dunes by the sea and just be with the elements, you know, that was a way to really feel calmer again. (October 13, 2005)

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Informed by her knowledge of Buddhism and of Native American shamanism, Margot noted what the process of menopause brought with it. Her experience calls to mind William’s hat and Jenny Joseph’s poem: It definitely feels like it was a kind of deep initiation into a new phase of life. That is a very powerful cycle, you know, a real sense of . . . yes our life does have cycles and as women we are particularly clued into this. And the part of that cycle has been somewhere a real . . . evaluation of “So, what have I left, what have I made of my life, what is important now, what illusions do I need to let go of, what things do I want to live now in my life, what has been my unlived life, what do I need to grieve for not having or for not living?” You know, every choice in my life has meant a ‘no’ to something else. And somewhere an acceptance of, ok, this is what my life has been up to now. It hasn’t been a life I might have wished or . . . you know, the material security I might have wished for or the happy ever after relationship I might have wished for . . . that those things have not been mine. But somewhere also of gathering the harvest of what has been mine, of what have I achieved, who am I, what have I gathered in my life. (October 13, 2005) I asked Margot why she had refused hormone treatment: I felt that I trusted my body, I felt that I trusted, you know, this is occurring in my body and I don’t want to mask it, I don’t want to disguise it, I don’t want to alter it, I don’t want to try to hold on to being younger for longer. I want to really listen more deeply to my body, and if I try to change what is going on I can’t hear it really. I felt very strongly, there are side effects, it is a kind of meddling and it is part of a culture that doesn’t honor aging, that doesn’t really honor the cycles of life, but wants to taper and fix and change. . . . You know part of the thing of face lifts and all that part. I just felt like, no, this is a time, this is a time to be in touch with myself and not try to push it away. (October 13, 2005) Just as after her last bleeding Margot felt the need to live closer to nature and moved to live in the Findhorn community in Scotland,35 Lara Owen wanted to withdraw from the world and moved back from California to Europe: I think that’s one of the reasons I came here [Sorèze]. I felt I couldn’t live quietly enough to go through menopause in California . . . a passage that demanded a lot of peace and solitude. I had a busy life teaching and working in California and I realized I couldn’t keep that up and get through menopause and stay healthy. So for me menopause has been a

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sort of bigger retreat. I see menstruation as being a little retreat every month and menopause is a big retreat for however long, maybe three years. And then you are done and you are coming out to the world again and I think I am at that point. I am starting to feel I can go back into the world and be able to be more visible. (May 28, 2005) Margot felt that maybe this new phase brought with it a renunciation of the world, and she had stepped out on the pilgrimage expecting a process of renunciation and elevation: “And when I came to Marseille what happened was a real rising of sexual energy, a rising of a kind of sexuality and a real, you know, I stepped into the pilgrimage and it was much more of a ‘yes’ to the pleasures of life as well. The kind of delights of eating and drinking and comforts and, yes, celebrating femininity and all of that. So it has been a different journey. You know I had thought about shaving my head but then I realized, no, this isn’t the energy of Magdalene really” (October 2, 2005). As the pilgrimage led Luciana to understand that she could be both a nun and a priestess,—that is, that being a spiritual woman and having entered menopause—did not mean renouncing her sexuality, so the pilgrimage helped Margot overcome the idea of the spiritual woman as Catholic nun and find instead a sense of freedom reminiscent of Clara’s lessons about the dragonfly. Margot commented: I guess something about turning fifty for me and coming to the journey was also a sense of liberation, in the letting go there is something about the freedom. The freedom of just being who I am, as I am, and maybe there was one phrase that came to me. The renunciation is the renunciation of the nun, in the way you know, to renounce that and embracing the lover and not even have any preconceptions about what the renunciation is and just to be open and feel free to [experience] what comes . . . I literally do not know what I’ll do next, so there’s a freedom and an openness really. (October 13, 2005) Referring to the other women of Roger’s group, and especially to the eldest in their seventies, Margot observed: “I feel there is a long history in a sense of menopausal women becoming more contemplative or devotional and freeing themselves from the world to act more in the world. And there was something strong in a way on the tour. Some of the older women, to see how beautiful some of them were and realizing like, Brenda, is in her seventies you know, and . . . my God, that’s very powerful” (October 13, 2005). We see here again how the pilgrimage group offered the pilgrims the chance to see themselves reflected in younger or (as in Margot’s case) in older pilgrims. Margot’s account about menopause as a life period related to “facing demons” by

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coming to terms with problematic aspects of one’s life was similar to that of other pilgrims. The way in which Margot experienced the pilgrimage can only be understood in the context of her entire life story. Without taking into account the personal relationship she had already with Mary Magdalene because of being born in the Scottish equivalent of a Magdalene house, or the fact that when starting out for the pilgrimage Margot had just entered menopause, one cannot appreciate the insights and transformations she refers to. For Margot, facing menopause also meant facing death. One of the Buddhist practices she was following before the pilgrimage had been, as she put it, “to contemplate death so as to live your life more fully”. She added: “One of the other strong moments for me was knowing I was coming to meet la Mère de la Bonne Mort [the Mother of the Good Death], because I suppose that part of my journey, you know turning fifty, was something about facing mortality, facing my own aging and my own human frailty. And preceding my fifties, going through menopause, the experiencing of a lot of changes through my body, some concerns about what was going on in my body. So there was something powerful in facing her, you know, really thinking about death” (October 13, 2005). Margot saw a similarity between the Magdalene meditating with a skull at her side and this Black Madonna of the Good Death. If in Dana’s terms, Magdalene could teach women how to face the loss of their partners, for Margot she also helped them to face their own deaths. Margot felt clearly the need to ritualize her menopause and to attend this event fully.36 This process allowed her to make sense of the passage from fertility to nonfertile age but also to relate ritually to another event that she would probably not be able to ritualize herself, her own death. If menstruation seemed to be related to death because it implied the absence of pregnancy and therefore the death of a potential baby, menopause seemed to be more related to one’s own physical and/or spiritual death. This connection clearly emerges in the poem Margot wrote after visiting the Black Madonna of Good Death. La Dame de Bien Être She lays me on a table in a white tiled room I seem to remember the hospital theatre being born from my mother’s womb. She anoints my body with warm black volcanic earth I am descending like Inanna into the depths, I am a corpse being laid out by the duena at the time of death.

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She wraps me in a sheet of plastic like a shroud, then she seals me in a heavy wrapping like a funeral robe or the inner layer of a sarcophagus. I feel like Isis, hands folded on my breast where a golden ibis rests. She leaves me and I am alone like a corpse inside a morgue, I see my reflection on the ceiling. I try to maintain a sense of feeling and to regulate my breathing as I contemplate my last. I see my reflection as a skeleton, a funeral cask, I melt into my mother, knowing I am made of earth I have dug my grave and laid in it before. I thank my mothers and the Mother, I sing a song of praise to Her and glory in this body made of earth. Knowing I was born of Her and will return to Her in death. Knowing now, that of the many Black Madonnas I have come so far to see the one I have become, the one I will return with, is me.37

Black Madonnas and Other Divinities Related to Darkness In addition to the Sainte-Baume, the nearby town of Saint-Maximin, and the village of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the other sites that the pilgrims found particularly relevant were what they called Black Madonna shrines, which their spiritual-esoteric literature related to Magdalene.38 None of these other sites were visited by all three groups. Except for Notre-Dame de la Confession in Marseille, visited both by Dana’s and Roger’s groups, other places were included in the tour only by Celso or Roger alone.

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Black Madonnas played an important role in Roger’s pilgrimage, and the dark statues39 also impressed the Italian and Iberian pilgrims. While each was different, the dark statues in general provoked certain common feelings and observations. Many of the pilgrims thought of the Black Madonnas as further expressions of the dark, hidden part of the Goddess. Their impact on the pilgrims further elucidates Mary Magdalene’s roles and their need to embrace the darkness that had been excluded by Christianity. With the exception of the cathedral of Chartres, with its dark Madonna of Notre-Dame de Sous Terre and its labyrinth,40 which left a strong impression on all the Italian pilgrims, the other sites affected some pilgrims more than others. As the reader may recall, both Luciana and Leonard had had spiritual experiences in Chartres related to their past lives. Other Black Madonna shrines that impressed the pilgrims were those of Saint-Victor in Marseille, of Rocamadour41 and of Le Puy-en-Velay. The dark statue of Sainte-Sara in Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer played a particularly important role for the pilgrims as she was not only black, but also supposedly linked to Mary Magdalene’s arrival to Gaul.42 Les-Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer is a village on the beach composed of small white houses and a fortified church (see figure 1.3). A popular sea resort for the French, it is invaded every year by Roma, tourists and anthropologists who want to experience the three days of festivity (the 24 through the 26th of May) which are held to honor Saint Sara, described as patron of the Gypsies, and two of the Marys of the Sea.43 It would take too long here to discuss in depth the meanings attributed to black statues of Madonnas and saints and the pilgrims’ experiences when contacting the statues’ energy.44 Suffice it to say here that the pilgrims considered the statues45 cultural survivals of pre-Christian goddess cults and thus a privileged access to the energy of the Goddess and especially Her dark side. The main source pilgrims and leaders relied upon for their interpretation of Black Madonnas was the Jungian analyst Ean Begg’s 1985 book The Cult of the Black Virgin. Begg’s book was in turn influenced by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which had been published in 1982. Black Madonnas also appeared as representations of the power of Mother Earth. The reader may recall that Mother Earth had a destructive side, and according to Clara and some pilgrims might even ask for blood sacrifices. The most important divinities related to the pilgrimage, Mary Magdalene, Black Madonnas, and Mother Earth, were all related to darkness. The notion that their importance had been obscured by the Church was ambiguously considered a cause and a consequence of their relationship with darkness. Tanya Luhrmann46 analyzes the importance given to the dark, destructive side of the Goddess among some of the women she met in her fieldwork among middle-class Londoners in 1983–1984. She asks herself why women influenced by the subculture of feminist spirituality and practicing modern witchcraft who

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followed a religion “that they had, in effect, invented” would “choose to see God (or the Goddess) as destructive, chaotic, fearsome or cruel.”47 The women Luhrmann describes had many traits in common with Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims, and life-events that Luhrmann’s Londoners related to the dark aspect of the Goddess coincide with those of some of the Magdalene pilgrims. After attending a workshop about menstruation, Luhrmann observes: The Old Woman, the hag, initiates the death that enables life to feed on death: she gives to us the recognition of the need for death. The practitioner is supposed to see this aspect of the goddess in old age, loss, pain, and sorrow, and also in irrational rage, lust, violence, menopause, and, sometimes, the experience of menstruation itself . . . It seemed to me that the women I met who were involved with Goddess spirituality were very involved with the third aspect of the Goddess, with the Goddess as death, underworld and destruction .  .  . They spoke of being initiated through her, of reaching the “deepest,” “truest” aspect of themselves through her; they spoke with scorn of people who thought of the Goddess as “sweetness and light.” Indeed the point of the Goddess seemed to be that this divine had an aspect that was as far from conventional feminine sweetness as it was possible to be . . . When I was in London a dog-eared book on the Goddess was passed from woman to woman within this network. Called “Descent to the Goddess,” it focused on the most ancient of Persephone tales, the Sumerian myth of Ereshkigaal and Inanna written on clay tablets in the third millennium B.C. . . . Many women spoke to me about the myth as the experience of being torn apart; they spoke of the experience of feeling the good girl within them—the Inanna-self—destroyed by their own Ereshkigaal-like raging anger and lust. They explained the experience of the myth as the experience of menstrual cramps so bad they couldn’t think, of suicidal despair, of abortions, of madness, of losing jobs and lovers, of discovering their hatred of their mothers, their culture, their selves. The tale seemed to have enormous power.48 The women also told Luhrmann about fathers despising femininity, the feeling of Christianity as sexuality-denying, and other elements that also emerged from the Magdalene pilgrims’ accounts. Dana’s pilgrims in particular criticized the romantic vision of an ever good and loving Goddess and emphasized the need to recognize the destructive side of the Goddess and of Mother Earth who could kill thousands of people with an earthquake. But this aspect did not seem as salient as among the Londoners described by Luhrmann, and among the Magdalene pilgrims I came to know it was not described and analyzed in such detail. The dark side of the Goddess was treated as one of the aspects that

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particularly needed to be restored to women’s everyday life, because it had been tabooed by Christianity. The Persephone myth was given special importance, but images and references of destructive goddesses did not prevail. Black Madonnas could be related to transformation and death, as in the case of Our Lady of the Good Death in Clermont-Ferrand, but they still maintained some of the lifepreserving qualities of Mary, the Mother of God. Like Dana’s pilgrims, another woman cited by Luhrmann, Rose, related this dark aspect with the phase of the dark moon, menstruation and the wise woman. She also referred to herself as “the garbage that fertilizes the garden,” an image that parallels the Goddess Wood pilgrims’ idea of nurturing the earth with their blood. In Rose’s case, a painful abortion connected her with the dark aspect of the Goddess. In my fieldwork, twenty years later, I found that certain basic ideas were still shared. The attitudes of the women Luhrmann described are similar to many of those of the Magdalene pilgrims. There are differences of emphasis, and now not only the leaders, but also many pilgrims, have integrated some of the analysis described by Luhrmann in their own discourse. In fact, the authors and texts Luhrmann draws upon in her article were known to one or more of the leaders of the Magdalene pilgrimages. As we have seen, they all had a more or less formal training in psychology and were therefore acquainted with Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein.49 Celso had been the disciple of a Peruvian anthropologist who drew upon Levi-Strauss’s theories, and Roger had written a dissertation on Simone Weil.50 As in the case of the offering of menstrual blood to the earth, the anthropologist is confronted with pilgrims who have clearly been influenced by current anthropological and psychological theories, and this influence considerably complicates the use of these theories to analyze theories and practices. Like Luhrmann, I found that the divinities the pilgrims related with the dark side of the Goddess served to validate “their experience of a society in which they experience violence, but in which women’s anger is not well tolerated.” The rituals allowed them to come to terms with a mixture of “anxiety, doubt, fear, and anger” related with the politics subsequent to the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.51 Luhrmann observes: The women are socialized to be nurturing, relationship oriented, and, usually, the primary parent of their children. Yet, they are expected, as well, to be career women: cutthroat, competitive, and successful within the canons of a male-dominated workplace . . . There is no final, culturally sanctioned model for middle-class female behavior . . . From this perspective, the angry images would not only represent women’s anger as powerful, but they would also help women to transform culturally induced shame at being angry and female into an experience of pride . . . In this way these women are using a very old, very powerful, way to deal with

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suffering, which is to name it, to place it within a narrative of transformation, and by the naming and narrativizing to feel some mastery over it.52 However among the Magdalene pilgrims, the quest for darkness involved men as well as women; in Roger’s group the pilgrim who most focused on it was Leonard, who criticized Catholicism and also the Liberal Catholic Church he had been part of for not recognizing the importance of darkness. He wrote in an email some weeks after the pilgrimage: The primary message I got from the tour is that it’s important to embrace the darkness within myself—to explore and integrate those aspects of myself that I’ve rejected—and I’ve been doing that intentionally since I returned. We each have our own unique parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected, but I also feel that there is a collective darkness that humanity has been rejecting, and that is the great feminine principle, which is symbolized by Mary Magdalene and the Black Madonnas. This collective darkness is huge and complex, but I feel that some of the issues it touches upon are sexuality, receptivity, and vulnerability. It is the fertile, earthly quality that the church rejected in favor of a sky god who came from a virgin mother. As we have seen, in the pilgrims’ terms darkness was related to femininity. Men, who had been raised in a social and religious system they perceived as negating their female side felt that they had not been allowed to explore their dark, female side related with vulnerability. The dark divinities of the pilgrimage helped men as well as women to come to terms with passages of their life and aspects of their personality left unaddressed by the sociocultural and religious system they grew up in. If men who had been socialized to be strong and assertive could acknowledge and voice their vulnerability, women could come to terms with their anger and the other emotions and states they had learned to consider as inappropriate for a good girl.

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Ending The Pilgrimage And Returning Home

In this last chapter, we will consider the end of the pilgrimages and then turn to reflect upon the meaning of pilgrimage itself. Both Celso and Roger concluded their pilgrimages in Vézelay, a little town in Burgundy. An important pilgrimage shrine in the Middle Ages, the basilica of Vézelay now can claim only a minor portion of Mary Magdalene relics. In fact, only a few pilgrims from Roger’s group visited Vézelay, as it was part of the optional extended tour. Most of the pilgrims finished the trip in Lyon after visiting Black Madonna shrines in Le Puy-en-Velay, Saugues, Saint-Julien-de-Chazes, Brioude, Issoire, Orcival, Besse-en-Chandesse, Clermont-Ferrand, Marsat, Marthuret, and Mozac. All the pilgrims I spoke to were skeptical about Magdalene’s relics in SaintMaximin and in Vézelay. Roger himself had an openly critical attitude toward them. Before arriving at Saint-Maximin, he read out loud a passage by Susan Haskins1 that described the importance of relics in the Middle Ages and the quarrel between the monks of Vézelay and Saint-Maximin over the authenticity of Mary Magdalene’s relics that both claimed to possess.2 After visiting the Saint-Maximin crypt and seeing the relics, Katrina from Roger’s group commented: “Saint-Maximin, the skull, I thought it was absolutely hilarious. There was all this competition over relics. However, I was very respectful” (October 3, 2005). For some pilgrims the relics served as portals to other dimensions of meaning, to past lives, and to memories from the present life. Perhaps most importantly, the presence of these devotional objects allowed pilgrims to heal the wounds that appeared in some way linked to the objects. Memories and wounds were awakened through a complex system of associations, and Celso explained that whatever one might think of the authenticity of these and other relics, sometimes they worked miracles, and the pilgrims should be open to this possibility.

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Final Sharing and Impressions An important part of the organized pilgrimages was the time for sharing, when pilgrims could describe their doubts and feelings, tell others about a particular insight or vision, and ask the leaders for help in interpreting spiritual experiences. Dana was the one who left the most room for this kind of meeting and called it with the usual Spanish term una rueda de palabras, a wheel of words. Roger was normally available for consultation at dinner and invited pilgrims to share their questions and feelings whenever there was an evening slide show. Celso provided the least time for sharing, and at the end of the trip the Italian pilgrims complained that he had not allowed them to get to know each other well enough or to share their experiences. Both Dana and Celso ended their pilgrimages with a group ritual, thereby confirming the importance attributed to group ritual actions and exercises of connection during their respective pilgrimages. Roger had a less ritual approach and in fact did not ritually mark his pilgrims’ departure. On October 6, 2005, in Le-Puy-en-Vélay, a medieval shrine with a dark Madonna statue, Roger organized a special meeting of the group to discuss their ideas and feelings about Mary Magdalene in order to allow me to gain a sense of the pilgrims’ views and ask them specific questions. As the group gathered in the late afternoon, I asked them to tell me about salient experiences during the pilgrimage, their ideas about Mary Magdalene, and the pilgrimage experience. Even if this was not a final sharing, it allowed pilgrims to sum up their pilgrimage experience so far and I cite here one of the comments that provided particular insight about the way Roger’s pilgrims conceptualized their experience. Toward the end of the sharing, pilgrims cried and laughed, moved by their own or others’ experiences and words. To conclude the meeting in a cheerful and ironical way, as was Roger’s custom, we both decided to end with a question about the funniest experiences of the pilgrimage. Almost all the pilgrims agreed that urinating all together in the woods of the Auvergne in the middle of nowhere had been a peak moment. The fun experience related by Elisabeth was her last word in the Magdalene sharing and is a good example of the creative approach these pilgrims had to Christian saints: Today I finally got up to the top of the Saint Michael chapel [in Le-Puy] and I was expecting to do a serious interview with Anna, but I just got in and sat in front of the Saint Michael statue and was quite overcome, because I have been calling on Saint Michael without really knowing the difference between a saint or an archangel, due to my Protestant upbringing. But I remember that one of my teachers in spirit releasement therapy . . . had said, if you really get in trouble during a session you can

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always call on Saint Michael and so I would, and it worked every time. It was kind of this little joke with me since I really had no idea who Saint Michael was. And there I was sitting in the chapel and just beside myself with sort of a chuckle and the tears were flowing. I was so grateful and overcome with the power of a being full of light, who could call in legions more of light for anybody that might ask. To Elisabeth and the other pilgrims, saints were not abstract divinities, but human beings like them. These saints had managed to follow their own personal spiritual path and to reach a status of elevation that allowed them to be recognized as saints and to manifest their power by working miracles. For this reason, one could talk about them in apparently irreverent ways. Concerning the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, Elisabeth said: “I think that they found one another during those years of his travel and preaching; she picked him up and they were both thrilled with being able to communicate on a very deep level in metaphor, in song and in glory. They were having fun exploring and inspiring this ministry of truth and love together within their relationship and that’s probably the story that got lost: how much fun they were having” (October 6, 2005). In all three groups irony was important; all three leaders, and Roger in particular, left the pilgrims free to tap into the energy of the place and play with it, enjoying the spiritual experiences that might occur to them. These spiritual experiences were not necessarily serious, but the less serious ones could be equally effective.3

Objects Taken and Left During the trip, Lynn, William’s wife, told me that she found it interesting to observe when people left things in the visited places or took objects from there, either picking them up or buying them. She said that it told her something about the way people related to the sacred, whether they wanted to take something from it or to offer something to it. All the pilgrims, whether traveling in groups or on their own, tended to gather stones, branches, flowers, water, or other natural elements from the pilgrimage sites.4 They also bought objects in the souvenir shops and later charged them with the energy of the related site. Some of them also left things. The most common gesture was to light a candle. Some would leave flowers picked along the way. Pilgrims from Roger’s group also offered money, something I did not see the Italian and Spanish pilgrims do. There were also pilgrims who offered something brought from home in the places that felt especially important. In Roger’s group, Margot left small crystal

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hearts. As the reader may recall, Margot could not herself afford the trip and had to raise funds to pay for it. She had bought a number of crystal hearts and had given one to each person who had contributed. She brought the hearts left over with her and offered them in most of the sites she visited, saying a little prayer of thanks for those who had helped her. In this way, she told me, she created a connection between herself and the places but also, in some way, she shared the sites’ energy with her friends. Lynn and William also brought some things with them, ceramic miniature pouches that Lynn made herself. Lynn told me: “I do these little clay bottles, they look like little pouches and they can be a necklace, but I have placed them in places that are important to me, and we’ve already put three on this trip, dropped one in a river . . . one into the garden in the place where Van Gogh was in the hospital and one in the cave of Mary Magdalene” (October 4, 2005). I asked Lynn if she felt that this created some kind of connection with the place: Yes, it is also a gift and a little prayer, a little prayer of connection. I like it that it’s not something that I bought, or money. It is something that I made. In the past, I have sold them to people who wanted them, to my friend, whose husband was dying. So to me and my friends, they have a little numinosity. You can put a little script inside them . . . I put them into places that matter to me. And I think there are others here in Europe from previous times. I have a map of where they all are that I began eight years ago. I am a potter. They are almost a meditation thing. I take a small piece of clay and divide it in two. Then each half is pressed into the palm of my left hand, making a cupped shape that bears a raised print of the palm of that hand. The two halves are joined together, except for an opening at the top where I use a tiny clay coil to form the neck. Tiny handles are added between the neck and the body. Each bottle is glazed and high-fired, making it strong enough to last through the ages! They are very personal, I like the imprints on them. (. . .) I haven’t put them anywhere that didn’t seem important. (October 6, 2005) Like Estrella, who mapped the places where she offered her menstrual blood, Lynn had her own pouch-map. In both cases, women referred to the fact that there was something in the offering that belonged to them and to nobody else, a signature of their essence as human beings: the lines on Lynn’s hands reproduced by the clay and Estrella’s blood conserved in an alcohol dilution. William told me about the pouch he left: When you are taking pictures, you are taking something away. But when there is a place where I have been touched, then I leave something. And

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a lot of pilgrims do, I understand, leave things, flowers; we have been to shrines, especially folk shrines, they are just filled with things that people bring and leave. In those places that attach me I want to leave something also. And it’s a blessing for the place, it’s a blessing for all that part of the human psyche that reveres and honors, so it’s that spirit I am honoring, more than the particular spirit embodied by the place. (October 6, 2005) Before I left the group, William and Lynn gave a pouch to me. During the pilgrimage, both Celso and Dana gave their pilgrims things they could take home with them as a remembrance and as a way to connect with the energy of the pilgrimage and all their experiences and insights related to it. Dana’s pilgrims brought home several things: the ritual red girdle they had crocheted for themselves, including in it a small sphere representing the planet earth; a small plastic container with earth from the Sainte-Baume containing some drops of the group’s diluted blood; and a necklace with a small white wooden dove representing the female Holy Spirit, which Dana bought at the souvenir shop at the Sainte-Baume. At the end of the pilgrimage, Dana gave the women the already mentioned holy card that certified their participation in the pilgrimage. It showed the icon of the Magdalene holding an egg. Dana invited the pilgrims to put the card on their altars. Celso gave his pilgrims a goodbye present as well. In Vézelay, after recounting their most important pilgrimage moment, each person took a semiprecious stone from a bag, putting one hand inside and feeling for the stone they wanted. Celso had brought these stones, of various colors, from Mexico, and they traveled with him during the pilgrimage. They therefore contained energy from many sources: from the unspecified place of origin in Mexico; from all the places visited on the pilgrimage; and finally from the spirits invoked by Celso and other pilgrims during an offering to Mother Earth the group made in the Cathar fortification of Montsegur following the principles of the Andean tradition. As stones carrying a particular energy, they became khuyas. According to the Andean tradition, the energy of khuyas could derive from a spiritual teacher, (e.g., Andean priests who had charged the stone by passing on to it their knowledge and power), from another important person (parents, friends) or from a powerful place; the khuya could also relate its owner to a particularly important event such as the pilgrimage.5 In this way each stone taken by the pilgrims had become an object with power which they should keep as a kind of file, storing the energy of the entire pilgrimage as well as Celso’s knowledge, experience, and power. Toward the end of the pilgrimage, most pilgrims felt worn out from the continuous travel and sought to gain an overview of what they had experienced and learned on the trip. There were many things they felt that they would be able to

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understand and express only after a certain time had passed, but most of them already perceived that something inside them had changed. As we have seen the moments of insight occurred not only in the churches and the other special sites, but also in shops, restaurants, or on the bus.

Changing Forms of Pilgrimage In the last twenty years, many scholars have responded to the invitation of the anthropologists John Eade and Michael Sallnow6 to look at the practices of pilgrimage.7 The way in which the pilgrims appropriated Christian shrines confirms these authors’ assertion that pilgrimage shrines are arenas “for the interplay of a variety of imported perceptions and understandings, in some cases finely differentiated from one another, in others radically polarized.”8 Eade and Sallnow observed that Victor and Edith Turner’s influential model of pilgrimage could be seen as “representative of a particular discourse about pilgrimage rather than as an empirical description of it.”9 In the groups I observed, the notions of communitas and of an absence of hierarchical secular roles and status, proved quite relevant, not so much as tools for understanding the pilgrims, but rather as direct sources for the pilgrims’ discourses. The pilgrim postulated by the Turners experiences a liminal dimension where time and space lose their everyday meaning and there is a sense of brother- or sisterhood with fellow pilgrims. This was one of the objectives that Celso and Dana set for their pilgrims: to leave everyday life behind and enter a space of transformation that was both individual and collective. In addition to the Turners, they also referred to Van Gennep’s theory of the rites of passage. Dana in particular emphasized that there would be a before and after of the pilgrimage, and that the pilgrim who had disengaged from daily life would finally go back home renewed after a series of initiations. All three leaders and many of the pilgrims knew both Mircea Eliade’s and the Turners’ writings about religion, ritual and pilgrimage,10 whether directly or through citations in other texts. One of the books Roger suggested his pilgrims read before the trip was Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred (1998), and Cousineau cites in a generic way the Turners’ theories, Simon Coleman and John Elsner’s Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (1995), and other anthropological studies. The leaders also stressed the importance of a sense of group and the attainment of a sense of union among the pilgrims. Eliade’s idea11 of a sacred site as a place where heaven and earth intersect and time stands still, offering the possibility of contacting the transcendent, was also relevant to the pilgrims’ accounts.12 The sacred power of a site was expressed in terms of the energy stored there. Vittorio, who had made the pilgrimage with his wife and his two-year-old son,

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explained: “The place probably helps you. I believe that it is the energy that remains on that site [that helps you]. Because I believe that anyway there always are some amounts of energy that remain in those zones and you manage to access them” (September 28, 2005). Magdalene’s pilgrims thought that this energy also influenced tourists who did not know about it, and who possibly had spiritual experiences there without knowing why. Catholic pilgrims of the past and present would have attributed these effects to God’s grace.13 Unlike Eliade,14 who distinguished between the sacred space of the site and the profane world surrounding it, the pilgrims considered that the sacred could be contacted or could manifest itself everywhere near the site. At the exact place considered sacred it was easier to access the divine, but insights and healing could happen even in a souvenir shop or a restaurant or, as with Margot, during a wellness treatment. Apart from the focus on person and place15 in the Magdalene pilgrimages the textual dimension was particularly relevant, and we have seen the influence of texts read before or during the trip throughout this study. As in the case of the pilgrims to Marian shrines described in a recent volume, I too found that “people unite and join with Mary [Magdalene] to fight against social inequality, oppression, violence,”16 but sometimes also ended up reconfirming certain dominant discourses about gender. In this sense I agree with Eade and Sallnow that it is useful to transcend a structuralist approach that sees pilgrimages as “either supporting or subverting established the social order,”17 but rather sees them as complex processes entailing an interplay of reproduction and transformation. More attention should be given to the importance of gender in the study of pilgrimage and the way in which female divinities are interpreted and used to legitimate gendered discourses.18 The pilgrimages described here did not have one single destination, but rather many sites, each with its own kind of spiritual attraction. The field of influence of the magnetism19 usually began to show in the pilgrims’ thoughts and words before they arrived at the sites. Moving toward a new place, pilgrims in their cars or in the coach began to wonder what the site would be like, to ask the leader or fellow pilgrims about it. Some pilgrims would say they were beginning to feel the energy of a site while approaching it or that they could feel that something important would happen there. Celso and Dana also explained that by traveling to several different places pilgrims were creating an energetic connection among them; that it was not just the separate sites, but also the route as a whole that brought healing. Pilgrims felt as if they were activating through their journey a route of pilgrimage related to Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine. Even if the route might be new in the sense that there was little precedent for pilgrims visiting the same sites in the same ways and following the same sequence, most of the places had been visited by Catholic pilgrims for centuries and the new pilgrims believed the

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shrines occupied the sites of pre-Christian temples. This new feminine route linking places related to Mary Magdalene appeared complementary to the route leading to Santiago, which the pilgrims described as mainly masculine, related to a male saint and attracting mainly male pilgrims eager to test and display their capacity for physical strength and endurance. Like the pilgrims in Glastonbury described by Adrian Ivakhiv and the women studied by Deana Weibel who visited Rocamadour,20 Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims contested21 the use the Catholic Church made of these sites and even charged the Church with having stolen them. Whereas in the title of her dissertation Weibel described her “Religious Creatives” in Rocamadour as “kidnapping the Virgin,” Dana’s pilgrims felt that their power places had been victims of a Catholic hijack. I agree with Alan Morinis22 that a pilgrimage cannot be reduced to a rite of passage, and that additional factors need to be taken into account. In fact, even if I have considered and analyzed the Magdalene pilgrimages throughout this text as rites of passage, we have seen that the ritual experience of passage represented just one aspect of the sacred journeys but that other dimensions like contestation and community-building played important roles. In his study23 Morinis adds movement to the coordinates of person, place, and text proposed by Eade and Sallnow.24 Nancy Frey25 described the centrality of movement and a hierarchy that appeared in the discourses of walking, cycling, and motorized pilgrims to Santiago. Only one of the Magdalene pilgrims actually complained about the fact that the trip was not made on foot; Felicia had made the pilgrimage to Santiago the year before, joining a group led by Emilio Fiel (who had brought Conchero rituals to Spain); when on Dana’s trip, she missed walking. It turned out that the Italian pilgrims, coming from a country with the most important Christian place in Europe, had problems with the term pilgrimage itself and preferred to describe their trip as a “journey of initiation.” When asked to explain the difference between pilgrimage and journey of initiation it seemed that they were practically synonymous, except that the latter avoided Catholic connotations for them, and instead of expiation, suffering, and redemption, evoked a spiritual quest. Celso had been leading spiritual journeys, initiation trips and pilgrimages to India, Peru, Mexico, and different parts of Italy and Europe for twenty years. He observed that “pilgrimage is a travel inside oneself. You [also] travel outwardly because the external geography is also a psychic geography. I mean, the places give you a reference to something that exists inside of you. Why does somebody make a pilgrimage? Because, through going, the person leaves the old world behind. She lets go of the habits, the relationships, everything that constitutes a tie, and opens herself up to risk, to adventure. She puts everything at risk. This is the idea of pilgrimage” (February 16, 2006).

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The power of the pilgrimage relied also on the continuing presence of other people, even though they could not be seen, those who had walked the pilgrimage paths in the past. But in contrast to Catholic pilgrims who might identify with other Christian or Catholic pilgrims who went before them, Mary Magdalene’s pilgrims tried to establish a connection with the energy of pilgrims from all religious traditions. Particularly in Roger’s group, many people felt that they had been on a pilgrimage during their whole lives, or at least from a certain point onward. Brenda, a psychotherapist from Florida in her early seventies from Roger’s group, said: I think that in terms of my life’s journey I was a pilgrim and didn’t know it, in terms of coming from survival into consciousness. And then into travel and into nurture. I’m being nurtured with what’s going on and also get healing. I’m committed to being that kind of pilgrim forever. From the age of twenty-six, when I decided not to use a gun on my brain, from that point onwards I have been a pilgrim. Not in my mind, but just in helping others to do the same, being a midwife to the true self. I have no answers, but a lot of questions and I do have the questions from others. Thanks to you because you are others [and provide me with useful questions]. (October 6, 2005) I found that most pilgrims integrated the messages and teachings they felt they had received into their lives. Unlike Frey’s pilgrims, they did not experience difficulties returning home.26 For most of them, the pilgrimage was a particular moment for spiritual experiences and practices but in their everyday life they were already used to taking time out to attend workshops, visit power places or meditate. What they did as pilgrims, in fact, was not something totally different from what they did once it was over. This trip was a special occasion for them to get in touch with people with whom they had spiritual affinity and to heal certain aspects of themselves. It also represented a challenge, because the pilgrimage itself, a group of people pursuing a similar spiritual goal, was a powerful catalyst. Felicia said: “During pilgrimages, there are many energies on the move. You do not find only rosy experiences, there also is the pain, feeling ill at ease and there are very powerful dreams. Suddenly you see things of your life in front of you, flash! there you see them. And there are very painful things. If you do not systematically take time out to get in touch with your inner feelings, you miss the things that come up, you lose the opportunity” (June 17, 2005). The other people in the group served as a kind of mirror for pilgrims to discover parts of themselves they did not like, or to awaken memories about people who had hurt them. For this reason, it was important for them to pay attention to their inner feelings during the trip and try to benefit from the teachings they brought with them, by finding periods of solitude and calm to process this material.

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These then were pilgrimages without most of the usual features: There was no specific final goal, no specific religion in which to inscribe their trip, and no typical ritual actions to perform. Yet the persons participating still claimed to be pilgrims. Their journey had Mary Magdalene as a reference, but she was by no means the only divinity involved. The places visited were mostly Catholic shrines but also included caves, waterfalls, castles, Roman ruins, and even a mental hospital. At first glance, these Europeans and Americans traveling in groups with their own cars or in a coach, filing into churches, taking pictures and listening to the explanations of their leaders, might look like ordinary tourists. Both Weibel and Ivakhiv pointed out that for their pilgrims it was difficult to draw a clear line between tourism and pilgrimage.27 But the main aim of these Magdalene travelers was spiritual; they had started out to search for a direct contact with divine forces and to understand better their own innermost needs. Most of them also were looking for some special healing and formulated certain requests in shrines they perceived to be particularly powerful.

Challenging the Tourist /Pilgrim Divide When I asked Susanna from Celso’s group what difference there might be between the Mary Magdalene pilgrimage she had made and other trips she made for more recreational, touristic purposes, she explained: “When I went to Burma [on an organized trip] I did the same [energy] practices that we could have done with Juan [Nuñez del Prado]. From a certain moment of my life onwards, all my travels have become like this. Because when I travel now, I connect myself with the river if there is a river, with the mountain and so on. It happens automatically; before it did not happen, obviously it did not happen” (April 8, 2005). To my surprise for Susanna, as for other travelers I met during my fieldwork, journeys described as pilgrimages or sacred journeys and trips made for recreational purposes where not perceived as essentially different; both kind of trips offered the opportunity to contact with the energy of the visited places and to receive spiritual insights. Like Susanna, also other pilgrims told me that ever since they had developed a different relationship toward Mother Earth and had learned to distinguish and make use of the different kinds of energies available in certain places, every trip was a pilgrimage. When I asked Susanna’s friend Luciana what difference there was for her between a trip and a pilgrimage she answered: From my point of view, as an individual, there is no difference at all. Because a trip does not only represent for me the pleasure of seeing a place, it implies a spiritual practice that I do on myself first of all. Even if I go, for instance, to Grottaferrada nearby [just outside Rome], this

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can offer me the departure point for something [a spiritual insight]. I mean, I am very open and therefore I leave a lot of space for the emotions that come up in order to get me working on myself. For this reason, every trip is a pilgrimage. If I visit places that also have a particular, more evident power, then this experience becomes even more striking, probably because it is the energy of that site that has a stronger influence on me . . . As I am very open to situations and places, there is no separation between me and the rest of the world and it really is as if I were a pilgrim walking 365 days a year. (April 9, 2005) Recent studies28 show that the boundaries between pilgrimage and tourism have become blurred, and challenge the notion that tourists are just mindless hedonists29 while pilgrims are exclusively pious. Just as pilgrims may have motivations that are not merely spiritual,30 tourists can have transformative experiences.31 Frey32 already noticed that the distinction between religious and nonreligious pilgrims to Santiago was not so important and motivations could include physical endurance, cultural interests, and curiosity. Ellen Badone has argued that “the prevalent Western characterization of tourism as frivolous and hedonistic . . . is derived from a set of implicit oppositions in Western thinking that are themselves the product of the Judeo-Christian and classical heritage.”33 The oppositions proposed by Badone are useful to understand Mary Magdalene pilgrims because the pilgrims explicitly criticize these oppositions as part of a patriarchal scheme inherent to Christianity that condemns the body, sexuality, and in general the material aspects of life, thereby legitimizing the exploitation of the planet as well as the domination and devaluation of women. These are the dichotomies proposed by Badone: money /asceticism consumption /poverty evil /good low /high material /spiritual tourism /pilgrimage34 As we have seen, through their use of an energy discourse the pilgrims found a way of conceptualizing pilgrimage that transcended these dichotomies. They were not unaware of folk and social theories35 depicting New Agers as consumers and their gurus as eager to accumulate money. But especially the American and British pilgrims led by Roger Woolger did not think that paying for an expensive trip, sleeping in four-star hotels, and eating in good restaurants were obstacles to spiritual experiences. Their general argument was that money is just another form of energy and it all depended on how it was used. Roger had his own ideas

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about organizing a pilgrimage as this was the sixth or seventh tour he had led. He held that pilgrims should be relieved of worry about accommodation, routes, and restaurants to facilitate inner transformation and insight. From the pilgrims’ point of view body and soul were intertwined.36 Both were made out of energy and could be healed and empowered by the energy in places of power. In order to ascend spiritually one did not need to renounce bodily pleasures; on the contrary, the pleasure of the body was linked to the well being of the soul. Activities normally related to tourism or others such as consulting travel guides or hiring local guides to get more information about the visited places also formed part of the pilgrimages. The pilgrims found that a particularly beautiful souvenir replica of a Black Madonna could be charged with the energy of the shrine; it was related to and served as a vehicle for further connections with the place once they were back at home. In a similar way touristic information from a written or oral guide could provide details about the energetic peculiarities of a place or identify spots particularly useful for healing. Even if they criticized the Christian ideal of pilgrimage, these spiritual travelers were not immune to the fascination exercised by the Christian medieval pilgrim; their Christian backgrounds inevitably led them to relate what they were doing to Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, or Compostela.

Pilgrims at Home As Nancy Frey did with pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela,37 I checked back with the Magdalene pilgrims once they were settled in their home lives. Were there major changes that might, at least in part, be attributed to insights or experiences during the trip? Like Frey, I found it was not possible to keep in contact with all of them. Some did not answer emails at all; others enthusiastically answered the first email but no subsequent ones. I did have the opportunity to visit some of the Italian pilgrims in April 2005, and I stayed in continuous contact with Dana and the pilgrims from Barcelona and the surrounding area. On special occasions, like the Candlemas initiation ritual for the Goddess Wood in 2005, I met other women from the pilgrimage of the blood. I stayed in contact by email with some of Roger’s pilgrims and met Katrina in London at Easter of 2006. Many pilgrims incorporated energy practices they had learned during the pilgrimage into their everyday lives. Others read books they had heard about from fellow pilgrims and visited pilgrimage shrines near their hometowns. For some of them, important changes and challenges arose after the pilgrimage, which they tried to handle by analyzing them in terms of their spiritual dimension and using them as an opportunity for personal growth. Often they described the pilgrimage as a sort of catalyst of energies that had provoked these changes in

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their lives. “If you change, the world around you changes,” they observed, and since they felt that after the pilgrimage they were no longer the same, it seemed a necessary consequence that people and events around them would adjust in order to adapt to and cope with this transformation.

Italian Pilgrims Some months after the pilgrimage, Celso parted company with Susanna, Luciana, and Gianmichele because they wanted to restructure the association the four of them had founded together. Celso therefore abandoned the association. After a journey to Venezuela, he began to research a spiritual path related to the ancient queen María Lionza and centered in the sacred mountain of Sorte in the Venezuelan state of Yaracuy. He also founded a new association and began to study familiar psycho-genealogy and psycho-magic, following the work of Alejandro Jodorowski,38 organizing workshops in Italy on psycho-shamanism with Cristóbal Jodorowski, the son of Alejandro. When I met him in 2006 he had shaved off his long white hair and cut his beard and looked totally different from the alchemist-like man I remembered. He had been traveling frequently to Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. Though he had not organized any more tours on Mary Magdalene, he planned to do so. Celso’s departure from the association was understood by the other three members as a result of the pilgrimage, one of the few activities the four of them had done together. They had been planning this common spiritual experience for months, trying hard to combine their vacation periods. Since one of the effects they expected from this kind of pilgrimage was a better understanding of their everyday relationships, the outcome was hard for all of them to accept. Finally the three remaining leaders decided to stick to their project and at the time of writing the association is still active. When I met Gianmichele and Luciana in the beginning January 2007, Gianmichele had separated legally from his wife and moved to a flat in Alba, where he still worked in the same factory. He had obtained his title of naturopath and was exploring the effects that family history had on a person’s health and choices. Like other Italian pilgrims, Gianmichele had felt the need for more time in the places he visited, and so he went back to France in the summer of 2005. With Luciana, he visited some of the old pilgrimage sites, as well as Tarascon, where the relics of Saint Martha were kept, and others related to the Cathars and the Templars. He also organized retreats in Italian power places to practice the energy techniques of the Andean tradition. After the pilgrimage, Luciana gradually shifted from her parents’ house to an apartment she had bought just outside Rome. Here she could create her own space and spend time with Gianmichele when he visited. She spoke enthusiastically

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about the second trip with Gianmichele to France, where she felt she could finally take all the time she needed to feel the places and profit from the energy, messages and images they offered her. She explained that she had gradually learned to master her sensitivity and her spiritual experiences. She was allowing the woman in her to manifest more and more and was satisfied with her own spiritual journey. Once they discovered what it meant and felt to be a pilgrim, some people decided to go on a more traditional pilgrimage with their local parish even if the energy connections they made there were not very orthodox. When in Easter 2005 I went to Rome to meet some of the Italian pilgrims, my trip involuntarily coincided with the death of John Paul II. The city was filled with pilgrims from all over the world attending his funeral. When I met her, Susanna was proud that since the pilgrimage she had not cut her hair, which was long and blond. She still worked as the secretary of the director of a major enterprise, but she had also become much in demand as a tarot reader, helping her friends and others with her advice. She hoped one day to be able to participate in the pilgrimage to Saint Sara. After the pilgrimage Immacolata had discovered her passion for Biodanza,39 and was training to become a teacher of this discipline. When I last spoke to her she was determined to go back to Chartres. Although many Spanish and Italian pilgrims said they wanted to return as soon as possible to the pilgrimage sites, few actually did. Like Susanna, Paola, a woman from Rome in her early forties, decided not to cut her hair after the pilgrimage. Both related this decision to Magdalene’s influence, as the long hair was one of the saint’s main attributes. When I saw Paola she had long curly dark hair, was wearing make up and a short skirt, and looked very different from the woman in trousers and with short, red, flattened hair that I had shared hotel rooms with. She told me that the work on her femininity during the pilgrimage had helped her to discover a side of her that liked to dress up and turn heads. Many of the Italian pilgrims did not tell family and friends that they had been on a pilgrimage. Sensing that those who did not share their spiritual practices would be unable to understand them, most pilgrims had preferred not to enter into details about their trip to France. Some of the Spanish and Catalan women did share part of their experience, because they could not resist telling their Catholic mothers that they had been saying the rosary and crocheting.

Spanish and Catalan Pilgrims The person who probably experienced the greatest changes in her life after the pilgrimage was Dana. Shortly before the pilgrimage she had terminated a year long relationship with a man. After the pilgrimage, she moved out of his house

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and settled in the flat she normally used for her workshops. Her mother, who had been living in Barcelona for many years, moved back to Argentina, and Dana had to accompany her, going back to her home country for the first time. Reading books about the desaparecidos and visiting associations dedicated to them, she felt the pain from the past well up again. From 2004 on, Goddess Wood activities attracted more and more women, and Dana was forced to ask the more committed members to help her with the organizing. In the summer of 2005, she went to Glastonbury, the legendary place of Avalon where according to legends collected by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her 1982 book The Mists of Avalon, the Celtic priestesses of the Goddess used to live. After this personal pilgrimage, at the end of 2005, Dana gradually began to lose her vision and doctors told her that she would probably lose the sight of at least one eye. She decided to take a period off from her work, stopped the activities of the Goddess Wood, and began treatment with a homeopath who put her on a strict diet and prescribed expensive medicines. She also consulted and was operated on by a well-known ophthalmologist. All went well, and Dana gradually recovered her sight. She took this difficult period as an invitation to focus on the things she felt to be most important and decided to write a book about her work with women. She wanted to explain to Spanish-speaking women how to celebrate the moon cycle and provide them with basic concepts about female spirituality. In the summer of 2006, she led the third biennial pilgrimage, this time to Glastonbury, where Mary Magdalene was supposed to have arrived with Joseph of Arimathea who was carrying the Holy Grail.40 During this pilgrimage the group attended the annual Goddess Conference in Glastonbury41 and celebrated the offering of blood to the Earth and the menopause initiation. Several of the women who had been on the 2004 trip went on this one as well. Some women from the Goddess Wood told me that after the 2004 pilgrimage something changed in their relationship with their bodies and in their way of expressing and living out their femininity. This change affected their ongoing relationships with partners and with men in general. Shortly after the pilgrimage, Carme’s long-term boyfriend, the man with whom she had her first lasting relationship, left her. During the trip she had found a new way of being in touch with her body and felt that this man did not really honor her body or make her feel attractive and proud to be a woman. Some months after their separation, she decided to stop feeling sad and start looking for a man that more closely matched her spiritual interests. In the next year she qualified as a teacher and moved to Northern Spain, where she was assigned a job teaching English. When I last spoke to her in summer 2007, she had started a relationship with a man who shared her spiritual interests and was living with him in a small town in the North.

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In the months following the pilgrimage both the married men from her circle terminated their affair with Felicia. She was sad and upset for a few months but gradually came to understand that she no longer wanted to be the other woman. When both men then changed their minds and wanted to resume a relationship with her, she initially agreed. However, she later put an end to both situations because she did not want to deceive their common friends any longer and longed for an exclusive relationship. After several months of hesitation, Felicia moved to the flat she had used for her healing practice in Barcelona, leaving her work as a security guard to work full-time as a healer. She took part in the third pilgrimage of the blood to Avalon in summer 2006 and began to lead the new moon celebrations with other committed members of the Goddess Wood, since Dana wanted to spend more time on her book. Some women from the Barcelona area who had discovered the Goddess Wood activities during the pilgrimage began to attend the monthly meetings to celebrate the new moon as often as they could. After the pilgrimage, Ruth continued to offer her blood and began to attend belly-dancing classes to ground herself and be in her body. She moved out of her parents’ home because she felt that she needed her own space. In her new flat in Barcelona she made an altar, where she put Magdalene’s pilgrimage card, candles and some other objects. One night she forgot to blow out a candle on the altar and the room where she was sleeping caught fire. She was unharmed but had to repaint the room. She interpreted this event as a manifestation of her relationship with fire, representing the masculine and also sexuality. During that period she had had sexual relationships with several men. After the fire she decided to stop having relationships with men who did not allow her to express herself and did not understand “her woman” (mí mujer). Some months later she moved from Barcelona to a small town on the Catalan coast, started a stable relationship, stopped looking for fulfillment through men, and began to “put down roots.” One month after the pilgrimage, Antònia began to work as a teacher for male prisoners. She told me that she felt the contact with her feminine part and her new life as part of the dragonfly clan helped her a lot in this work. For the first few months, whenever she drove up to the prison she sang a song of praise to the Goddess that she had learned during the pilgrimage: “Mother, listen to me, I raise my song to you and invoke the vision that might lead my steps.” She felt that if she had not fully embraced being a woman through the pilgrimage, she would have had problems working in an exclusively male environment. If she had been as masculine as she was before, she would have come into conflict with these men. Accepting with pride that she was a woman made her and the prisoners feel that they were different and had to treat each other as such. Antònia felt that having learned to embody the Goddess energy, she could better help these men, who were forced to live away from women and any form of caring or love. She also perceived that the pilgrimage had helped prepare her for the separation from her

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two sons, who had both left home. As she herself had begun a new phase in her life, she could accept that her sons were doing the same and she helped them to do so. After participating in the first pilgrimage of the blood in 2002, Sali, the manager who had to learn to allow men to help her, had a baby with the man she had met shortly after her presentation to the Goddess. After months of planning and preparations in 2006, she launched a program for Spanish women managers to help them gain recognition in their work. In the texts for this program she referred to principles she had learned through books about feminist spirituality and in the Goddess Wood, focusing on the need for women to ally with each other rather than compete. After attending the Saint Sara pilgrimage in May 2005 and Mary Magdalene’s feast in Saint-Maximin in the July, Estrella started to prepare a calendar for 2006 based on feminine spirituality. It had a circular shape and was based on the lunar cycle. She moved away from Barcelona, where she had been sharing an apartment with foreign students, and settled in a country house in the park where she used to make her blood offerings. There she lived with three others who shared her spiritual interests. For 2007 she had prepared a calendar with her pictures of altars, and at the time of writing she was still looking for somebody to finance her documentary project about menstruation. On the pilgrimage I did not have much of a chance to talk with Carmen, and for this reason I have not included her life story in the first chapter. A tall, thin woman in her early forties with long brown hair, the pilgrims referred to her as “Carmen de España” (Carmen from Spain) to distinguish her from the other Carmens and Carmes in Goddess Wood. She came from Zaragoza and was a fiery and talkative woman who used to tell those who asked about her job that she was a lorry driver. In fact, she worked with her father, who had a transport company, and she was always surrounded by men. She had earned the drivers’ respect, but, like Antònia, she often had longed for the chance to live out her feminine side more fully. She was divorced and had a teenage son who shared her interest in spirituality. As a result of the pilgrimage, Carmen became fully involved in the Goddess Wood’s activities and regularly attended the new moon celebrations of the Goddess Wood members in Zaragoza. In February 2005, she was initiated as a daughter of the Goddess and in December of that year she died suddenly of an aneurism. She had left instructions that her body should be donated to science. In November 2004 Carmen and I participated in a ceremony organized by Dana to celebrate the Celtic feast of Samhain in Zaragoza. The ceremony was meant to recover and heal one’s relationships with ancestors and make peace with death. I went by coach from Barcelona, and Carmen picked me up along with other participants. During a short stop for a coffee on the way to the rural house where the ceremony was to take place, Carmen told me how much the

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pilgrimage had helped her and how eager she was to participate in ceremonies like the one we were about to join. “I needed to know,” she said, “that all the work done with spiritual techniques to release pain and conflict and heal oneself also healed three generations before and three generations after.” This meant that through ceremonial work one could release the pain experienced by ancestors and prevent descendants from inheriting certain family patterns of suffering. Carmen was glad that, thanks to the spiritual work she was doing with the Goddess, her son would not need to go through the same trouble and suffering as she had. He would have his own difficult situations to deal with, but would be free from certain family burdens Carmen had had to confront and overcome. When I heard that Carmen had died, her words came back to me. It was almost as if Carmen had known that she would soon leave her son and wanted to do as much as she could to make his way easier. This same idea that spiritual work done on oneself helps to overcome repetitive family patterns of suffering emerged from other pilgrims’ accounts. Pilgrims often felt that sexual wounds, in particular, were in some way inherited from their parents or other family members. The spiritual practices they had done during the pilgrimage would therefore benefit parents and grandparents who were still alive as well as children and grandchildren. We have already seen that Encarna felt that her elder daughter’s ovarian cyst was an expression of the problems with femininity she had received from her family and passed on. Through her work with Magdalene energy, Encarna felt that she had managed to solve these problems, forgive her husband, and thereby help her daughters. Some months after ending her relationship with her cousin, Encarna decided to move out of her ex-husband’s house in Barcelona, where they had lived during most of their married life. This was hard for her because it also meant living apart from her younger daughter, who was in her twenties. Encarna felt that until she left that house she would not be able to feel economically independent from her ex-husband or to begin a stable relationship with another man. The small town near Barcelona where she settled was also the home of her friend Maria Rosa, and they began to go to workshops together. After the second pilgrimage with Maria Rosa and another friend from the same town, Encarna began a relationship with a man her own age. She did not feel comfortable, however, because he acted, as she put it, “according to the classical macho model” and wanted to control her and create a kind of partnership dynamic similar to the one she had known from her marriage. Encarna introduced him to a more spiritual approach, trying to show that partnership did not mean constant control of the other and that sexuality did not only and necessarily mean penetration or domination of the woman, but all to no avail. After her experience with Magdalene energy and all the healing work she had done to trust her body again, Encarna felt that a sexual relationship with this man would only hurt her, and she decided against it.

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After visiting the Sainte-Baume, Maria Rosa felt drawn to Jerusalem and went there with her husband. At the Holy Sepulcher she waited in vain to enter. She felt as though the people there did not want her, personally, to get in. Frustrated and angry, she turned to a Spanish woman in the same group who had once nearly died and had a strong belief in Jesus (Maria Rosa did not know whether or not the woman was an orthodox Catholic). When the woman embraced her to comfort her, Maria Rosa felt inundated by an enormous love. She said that she then connected with the energy of Jesus and understood that when you have that you do not need anything anymore. She concluded: “And so the Magdalene led me to contact Jesus.” When I last talked to her in August 2007, she told me that she once again felt a strong attraction to go to the Magdalena. She wanted to visit the Saint-Pilon chapel, which she had not seen, and later lead a group of women on an organized pilgrimage to Saint-Maximin, the Sainte-Baume and Les-Saintes-Maries-del-la-Mer.

British and American Pilgrims When I last saw Roger in November 2006, he had scheduled another Magdalenetour for 2007 and was looking for a publisher for a future book about Mary Magdalene. Immediately after the Magdalenetour, Margot spent a few days at my flat in Barcelona and then started out to walk a small section of the route to Santiago de Compostela. Back in Scotland, she was asked to cofacilitate a women’s sacred dance workshop. She therefore spent time researching biblical references to Mary Magdalene and writing texts that recreated the steps of the Magdalene’s journey of initiation. She described the workshop as a moving experience that allowed her to explore even further the figure of the saint. When I last heard from her she had begun a new relationship with a man, and felt that the Magdalene energy had helped her to understand that in order to live a spiritual life she did not need to renounce earthly pleasure. Katrina continued with the in-depth reading she had begun earlier on the subject of Mary Magdalene. She has continued to have spiritual experiences and visions of the importance of the Magdalene. She was giving talks on the Divine Feminine and the significance of the Magdalene archetype. She is currently researching the historical Magdalene and planning to write a screenplay about the Jewish Jesus, in which his attitude to outcasts and relationship to women, particularly Magdalene, will be explored. She is continuing with her work as a trustee and tutor for her spiritual healing organization. When I last heard from Leonard, he and Elisabeth had started an organization to provide counseling, therapy, life coaching, and personal growth workshops.

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Stepping out of a café in Saugues toward the end of the trip, William sprained his ankle. He passed most of the rest of the tour waiting in the bus while others went in search of Black Madonnas. Although William thought that he had already had “his pilgrimage moment” in Saint-Rémy-en-Provence with his hat, he discovered more things about himself thanks to the accident. At first he used a Gestalt therapy method suggested by Roger and had his ankle express what it felt: “Not being able to stand on my own two feet is what’s keeping me from getting into the sacred places I long to enter” is the message he received. Later Katrina gave him some healing with her hands and suggested that maybe he needed to forgive somebody. After some reflection, William found that he actually needed to forgive himself and discovered a sense of unworthiness: “My self-effacing ‘Gee, thanks a lot’ really masked a sense of shame at being held in someone else’s compassionate regard!” After the pilgrimage he decided to attend one of Roger’s past-life workshops because he felt that this sense of shame and unworthiness might be related to some past-life event. In an email sent after the trip, William talked about two steps during the pilgrimage: “The first brought me back to myself, restored my zest for life, assuaged the yearning I had felt before the trip began. The second I think now was deepening, in that it surfaced a problem at the core of my being, one that may have a direct bearing on bringing my life to a satisfying fruition.” * * * Finally, I cite Luciana’s comments about her transformation after the pilgrimage, because they well represent changes in their femininity described by other women: Yes, at a feminine level there have been really huge changes. Even if Gianmichele keeps telling me that I am still not able to wear gaudy colors, there really is an abyss between now and before . . . Now I am truly proud and glad to be a woman, I absolutely and definitely am. It is also a sort of statement to my father, because he tends to consider me a tomboy or to see me as a businessman, using the masculine form in any case and not to see me as a woman. One day we were sitting in the car with my mother on a Sunday and talking about the house [the house Luciana moved into from her parents’ house]. I told him with the attitude of somebody who knows exactly what she wants: “Dad, you have to get it into your head that I am a woman, I am not a man!” (April 9, 2005) Women like Luciana, Carmen, or Antònia, doing what, at least in Spain and Italy, are still considered men’s jobs, found that their contact with the Sacred Feminine allowed them to live out what they perceived to be their femininity. Luciana’s description expresses figuratively what it means to be a woman doing what is perceived to be a man’s task:

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So there is this reclaiming of being a woman, even if I keep wearing trousers and not getting dressed in a showy way. But many people who have known me for some years see me now and tell me that I am no longer the same person. I am definitely more feminine, far more, even if, paradoxically, I have cut my hair. This implies that even though from the external features I can still resemble a man, I mean, with trousers and with the male suits my work in some way imposes on me, inside I am strongly feminine. (April 9, 2005) Regarding the relationship between pilgrimage and healing, Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman observed that “pilgrimage can also provide a means of protest against that marginalized condition, a protest that may itself become part of healing.”42 As we have seen the pilgrims often described themselves as marginalized, or to put it in Dana’s terms, as “living at the border of society” because of their spiritual theories and practices, but also because they did not want to conform to that gender rules they perceived their society wanted to force upon them. Through their pilgrimages they affirmed the validity of their spiritual and political statements, came to terms with the wounds of their condition and experienced a sense of communion not only with the divine forces but also with others they perceived as like-minded persons of the present and past. The pilgrimage became almost a metaphor of their existence: It’s hard for me to put into words what it means to be a pilgrim because I feel as though my whole life has been a pilgrimage. So I don’t know what it was like to not be a pilgrim. But I am grateful for all those along my way who have inspired me, who have abused me, who have counseled me, who have ridiculed me, for all of them have helped me to find the way and each has served me as a pilgrim. And I am especially grateful to those that I meet along the way who are also pilgrims, who know there is no place of refuge in this world but nevertheless take their packs and set off and manage to find the comfort and solace and care of others who are also on the way. So I appreciate the opportunity to be with other pilgrims and to share the good cheer, to share stories of inspiration and to share that sense of purpose, that deep yearning and longing that calls us forth and keeps us going. (Leonard, October 6, 2005)

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Conclusion

How representative are these groups of Mary Magdalene pilgrims in general? How many people are involved in the phenomenon or share their worldview? It is difficult to answer these questions because one of the reasons for the success of this kind of spirituality is that it does not present itself as an organized religion with a membership that can be counted, and it is adopted by persons who feel the need to transcend religious affiliations. Moreover, as we saw from the pilgrims’ accounts, in European countries with a Catholic past like Spain or Italy Catholics embracing spirituality are only slowly emerging in the public arena. Most of them prefer to share their spiritual experiences and ideas only with those like-minded. On the other hand, energy language has crept into general usage, offering a nonsectarian discourse that everyone can share. While I was doing my research, the popularity of The Da Vinci Code1 gave some of these pilgrims’ theories worldwide resonance and illustrated their pervasiveness.2 This Magdalene revival in novels, essays, documentaries, conferences, and workshops was still going on at the moment of this writing in 2011.3 Time will tell whether it will significantly affect people’s ideas about Mary Magdalene, or instead disappear as a fad; meanwhile the anthropological study of these Magdalene pilgrims offers a picture window on the sacred journeys and new rituals emerging within contemporary spirituality. As we have seen, Magdalene pilgrimages existed well before The Da Vinci Code was published, and the novel’s readers are not necessarily potential pilgrims. Nevertheless, this book contributed to further spread theories like the return of the Sacred Feminine and the relationship between the way the Sacred Feminine has been covered up by the Church, and the subjugation of women in the Western world. Pilgrimages to sites related to Mary Magdalene in France are likely to increase in the future, and the increasing visibility of these non-Catholic pilgrims could well provoke a defensive reaction of those in charge of the sites. Throughout this study I drew attention to the feminist and body-centered varieties of contemporary spirituality too often lumped together under the general term New Age. The pilgrims I came to know share feminist spiritualist critiques

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of Christianity as yet another expression of patriarchy, but nevertheless believe in the potential of what they identify as the Christian tradition. Like many new Christian movements, these pilgrims claim to know the true teachings of Jesus, ignored by others, but unlike them they transform Jesus from the one and only Messiah to the male counterpart of Mary Magdalene. I paid particular attention to the way in which the leaders of the organized groups managed to establish their authority inside the group, and to construct little by little a complex topography of the visited sites that was closely related to the rituals they performed there. During their trips the pilgrims gradually created a new and corrected Christian pantheon, in opposition to the old and limiting one offered by the Church. They abandoned the orthodox concepts (but not the orthodox terms) of their Christian education and created their own Jesus, Mary, and Magdalene. From the fieldwork, it emerged that the female body and particularly its reproductive cycle were of crucial importance, both spiritually and politically. The pilgrims’ theories formed not only a religious system but also a political philosophy, explaining and denouncing the medicalization of the female body, the exploitation of the planet, and psychological and physical violence against women. Mary Magdalene as an icon of wounded femininity in the Western world appears to allow people—and women in particular—to talk about psychological and physical problems related to the body. It also allows them to focus on aspects of sexuality that divinities from what they identify as patriarchal and monotheistic religions do not speak to. Like neoshamans in the United States and Great Britain4 these pilgrims used terms and theories derived from anthropology, such as shaman or rite of passage, as well as allegedly ethnographic data about native American cultures. The indigenous wisdom derived from native shamans emerged as a powerful resource for overcoming the difficulties created by what the pilgrims considered their principal enemy, patriarchy, and what they saw as patriarchy’s most powerful ally, the Church. Appropriating elements from different indigenous traditions, the pilgrims extract myths and rituals from their original cultural and social contexts and tend to consider them as part of a unique corpus of indigenous wisdom. They describe the efficacy of the rituals based on this corpus using modern terms mostly deriving from psychology. And they interpret the kind of healing attained in the context of contemporary problems related to gender and sexuality, thereby ignoring the quite different concepts of sexuality, corporeality, and gender of the indigenous group these rituals derive from.5 Through their pilgrimages, the women and men whose life stories I have described affirmed the existence and power of metaempirical beings such as Mary Magdalene and Mother Earth that could answer their questions and help them to solve their psychological and physical problems. The pilgrims felt they had to help restore their Mary Magdalene to a wholeness that the Christian

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Magdalene did not have; their Magdalene could therefore listen to pilgrims in a different way and heal wounds that other divinities could not. If we use Élisabeth Claverie’s approach when analyzing the Virgin described by the visionaries and pilgrims in Medjugorje6 and consider the pilgrims’ Mary Magdalene or Mother Earth as social actors, we can observe what they do and what they make appear. All these divinities criticize the former divinities by proposing new features that are often opposed to the Christian ones. These divinities cause the appearance of a new corpus of texts describing them and new rituals which have been created to honor them that challenge many of the typical features of previous Christian and non-Christian rituals. In these new rituals there is no rigid preestablished pattern to be followed—flexibility and creativity are more important than following rules. Also, the texts the Magdalene pilgrims used as a base for their theories were not revered as holy and followed to the letter, but rather were constantly questioned, reinterpreted, and combined with ideas from different sources to create new theories. Through their rituals the pilgrims on these trips broke their silence, voiced the abuses they had suffered, and questioned not only Christianity and other established religions but the entire social system. These pilgrimages allowed women and men to share their suffering, reinterpret their lives in terms of their feminine side and evaluate how this side was denied or wounded. They could thereby stop feeling like victims of a patriarchal system and create their own corpus of rituals and theories. The pilgrims I came to know elaborated a common vocabulary, an energy discourse, to describe their difficulties and interpret the things going on around them in terms of energy. They detected an absence or insufficiency of connection to certain aspects of themselves or to certain divinities such as the Mother Earth. Using their own terminology, they described social problems in spiritual terms, thus redefining the source of the problems and considered inequality based on gender in terms of a worldwide wounded Feminine. Some of them reframed terms like “witch” or “crone” from their negative connotations and used them to point out the stigmatization of certain groups of women in a way reminiscent of the African American community’s use of the word “nigger.” Even though these pilgrims form part of a religious system that has not yet crystallized and their spiritual practices and rituals are very flexible, we have seen that there were some stable and constant elements, such as the sacralization of body and sexuality, the celebration of femininity, and the protection of the environment. Using terms and theories derived from the wider New Age repertoire, Neopaganism, and feminist spirituality, the Magdalene pilgrims created—with or without the help of a pilgrimage leader—a personal corpus of theories and practices that allowed them to make sense of difficult experiences. They managed to see the sexual wounds in their lives as part of an evolutionary path, an experience shared by others, that they can now speak about and see in perspective.

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Even if the leaders’ discourses were important in establishing the pilgrims’ symbolic universe and in guiding their enactment and interpretation of rituals, this process of transmission was never definitive. The pilgrims constantly challenged their leaders’ discourses, and even if they followed the ritual frame put down by their leader, they then used it strategically to pursue their own spiritual goals. As Sabina Magliocco has shown, Neopagan art and particularly the “ephemeral art”7 represented by altars is created to bring about healing “in the most basic sense of the word: making things whole.”8 To the Magdalene pilgrims this becoming whole meant being able to overcome the fragmentation of human experience and discover the sacred within, and to manifest the Goddess or the God in each of them. Dana invited the members of the Goddess Wood to create altars in their homes with a picture of themselves along with images or statuettes of gods and goddesses. In this way, they would recognize themselves as goddesses and honor their own divinity. Pilgrims, men and women, sought to recover contact with the Sacred Feminine and with the inner female part they felt they had lost in order to experience within themselves a balance between masculine and feminine forces. Estrella mentioned that she did not like the term God (Dios), which reminded her of the Catholic religion, but preferred to use the term Goddess (Diosa) because this latter included in it the term God, whereas the other term was exclusively male. For the pilgrims the figure of Jesus, who in Christian terms is human but also divine, was a basic reference. They considered Mary Magdalene his female counterpart and proof that a woman can be human and divine as well. For them, Mary emphasizes the sacredness of women through their capacity to bear children, while Magdalene demonstrates that women without children or stable partners can also attain divinity. Poems and other texts that Dana’s pilgrims wrote after important rituals emphasized this sense of being whole and one with the Goddess. Caroline Walker Bynum9 has shown the importance of food for medieval women and the primary role of the Eucharist in their mystical experiences. Dana, who emphasized Magdalene’s role as lover of Jesus, created a ritual of offering of menstrual blood to Mother Earth that both resembled and inverted the Eucharist. As Bynum observed, consuming the body of Jesus was often perceived by medieval women as a physical union with Christ, and was “described not only in images of disease and torment but also in images of marriage and sexual consummation; it sometimes culminates in what appears to be orgasm.”10 Pilgrims’ claims during their Eucharistic-like offering of menstrual blood had many things in common with those of the medieval women described by Bynum: “In the visions that women received at mass, they sometimes acquired metaphorical priesthood. I have discussed elsewhere the fact that women’s visions sometimes gave them general authorization to prophesy and teach and hear

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confessions. What should be noted here is that eucharistic visions occasionally projected women, in metaphor and vision, into access to the altar, even into the role of celebrant—things strictly forbidden to them.”11 Judging from Bynum’s analysis and ethnographic accounts of vernacular religion,12 there were many elements of continuity between the pilgrims’ spirituality and lived Christianity in the past and present. The appropriation of Christian sites and figures to justify and make sense of one’s own religious and political aims date back to the origins of Christianity. And as we have seen, Mary Magdalene is not new to interpretations and appropriations of her figure to justify gendered discourse. Some of the Magdalene pilgrims, like Dana, Gianmichele, and Antònia had been involved in politics. Others had participated in countercultural movements like Margot, Elisabeth, or Felicia. They all had finally looked for a different way to mobilize for a world closer to their ideals, feeling that political goals could not be divorced from spirituality. In chapter 4 we heard Gianmichele’s commentary about his work as an ecology activist in Italian Legambiente: “If you ignore the relationship you have with Mother Earth then any effort to make you aware is useless, because the basic cause cannot be understood.” In the same way, some pilgrims perceived that every political goal feminists attained would not bring about a real change as long as women continued to regard their menstrual period as a nuisance to be hidden or even eliminated and perceived their bodies as disconnected from the divine. By the same token, while men denied their female side, they could not develop a harmonious relationship to women individually, let alone respect their rights. The source for many of the pilgrims’ theories is a range of literature I called spiritual-esoteric. Typically, it might be a book that stimulated a pilgrim to search out more about spirituality in general or Mary Magdalene in particular. The pilgrims I came to know constantly questioned the historical truth of the theories in these texts, which themselves are hardly canonical, for often their authors invite the readers to research topics on their own.13 As we saw in the debate in Dana’s group about Magdalene’s marital status, pilgrims constantly affirm their prerogative to have their own opinions and create their personal approach to the sacred. They consider the theories they read in books or hear from the pilgrimage leaders to be useful if they are true not on a historical level, but on what I will call here a spiritual level. The spiritual truth of a theory depends on its capacity to foster the pilgrims’ insights about themselves, to help them in making a difficult choice or, more generally, to sustain them along their lifelong spiritual journey. Spiritual-esoteric texts were read, discussed, and lent and borrowed among pilgrims, and Roger’s pilgrims even had a small library inside their tour bus. If the pilgrims learned from the leaders, the latter derived their knowledge and their privileged status from their research. All the leaders had read a good

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deal about the subjects related to the pilgrimage. Celso and Dana further complemented this text-derived knowledge through direct experience with teachers who claimed to derive their wisdom from a Native tradition. Like an ethnography that offers the reader theoretical background combined with first-hand experience derived from fieldwork, the two leaders presented themselves as possessing both solid theoretical and practical backgrounds. Celso told me that the tradition and the techniques he had learned from Juan Nuñez Del Prado did not derive only from Don Benito, but were a mixture of teachings Juan had received from other Andean priests and the latter’s knowledge about psychology and anthropology. From his own travels to India, Mexico, and other countries attractive to spiritual seekers, Celso was aware of the refutations of Carlos Castaneda’s writings, the accusations made against fake gurus in India and the criticisms of self-made white or mestizo shamans in Peru and other Latin American countries. Nevertheless, during our conversations, Celso emphasized that he had experienced the healing power of the techniques related to the Andean tradition and other traditions, so their authenticity was a minor issue. Dana similarly was aware that the Spanish Conchero tradition, which emphasized the importance of the Sacred Feminine, was not exclusively an ancient Native tradition. As we have seen, she also told me that she did not believe that contemporary Mexican indigenous women offered their menstrual blood to the Earth, she was convinced that they had once done so. As in Celso’s case, she had put the rituals she taught to the test herself. She had offered her menstrual blood for several years and had seen the positive effects of these offerings on herself and other women. As with the theories in the spiritual-esoteric literature these two leaders used on their trips, the emphasis in the rituals was on efficacy, not authenticity or historicity. Dana and Celso and their spiritual teachers who had taught them the basics of the Conchero tradition and the Andean tradition acted as cultural translators. They extracted certain theories and rituals from their cultural context and transferred them into the pilgrims’ cultural system. During this translation process, they not only adapted the elements contained in the theories and rituals, they also needed to offer an adapted view of the original cultural context that would legitimate their translation. The leaders described the indigenous groups concerned as the heirs of pre-Columbian and prepatriarchal wisdom. Whenever contemporary ethnographic information challenged the pilgrims’ theories about the sexual equality, peacefulness, and ecological awareness of these groups, the leaders and pilgrims maintained that these characteristics were no longer present because they had been gradually erased by colonization and Christianization, but that they were still evident in their ancient inherited rituals. There is a long history of exoticism in Western spirituality movements, going back to the fascination of European medieval alchemists with Egypt.

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Freemasonry and theosophy also followed this trend.14 Said identified as Orientalism the occident’s projection of its own repressed concerns, including sexuality, onto the East.15 We could speak here of a Native Americanism whose terms and notions are largely drawn from anthropological texts. From the analysis of the pilgrims’ collective and individual rituals, it emerged that it was almost impossible for them to create a ritual ex novo.16 The elements they used to create their rituals revealed information about themselves and about the kind of religion and society they questioned. As Catherine Bell observed in regard to ritual innovation, “the tendency to think of ritual as essentially unchanging has gone hand in hand with the equally common assumption that effective rituals cannot be invented.”17 Many anthropologists have conceptualized ritual as traditional, collective representation and this implied that “the notion of individual and invented ritual was a contradiction in terms.”18 But religion, ritual, and necessarily also pilgrimage are the products of historical processes, and the self-conscious modification and even invention of religious dogmas or rituals does not belong exclusively to contemporary spiritualities.19 Invented rituals may not be as effective as traditional ones in the sense that their effectiveness is not attained nor manifested in the same way; but as we have seen from the pilgrims’ accounts, invented rituals do seem to have an effect and bring about changes on an individual as well as on the collective level. The communitarian dimension was important for the pilgrims and they created significant bonds not only with other pilgrims of their group but also with imagined past and future pilgrims. They also perceived themselves as part of a transhistorical, transnational, and transreligious community encompassing like-minded people of contemporary spiritualities, heretical Christian movements as well as indigenous peoples of the past and present. With their pilgrimages and rituals, the pilgrims sought to reinforce and revitalize their links to this wider community and foster its expansion. The pilgrims themselves framed their trips as extended rites of passage, self-consciously attempting to reproduce Van Gennep’s model as interpreted by Victor Turner. Much like the individual rituals intrinsic to it, the pilgrimage process allowed the participants to separate from their everyday world, see it from a critical distance, and reformulate its constitution by expressing and addressing issues and conflicts that were not recognized in their everyday lives.20 The pilgrimage fostered a passage from a previous stage where the pilgrims felt divided from parts of themselves and could not identify with the prevailing ideologies and social rules to a stage of greater integrity. The ritual healing process implied not only the repair of their fragmented bodies but also the creation of a temporary different world order perceived as opposed to the prevailing one. As with the American feminist and womanist ritualists in the late 1990s described by Bell, the “right to ritual” emerges here as the symbolic equivalent of other rights feminists had to fight for (the vote, equal pay). Claiming their right

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to create their own pilgrimages and rituals, these pilgrims also establish their access to the “power to define, mobilize, and nuance the images that shape their lived reality.”21 I do not want to argue here that these pilgrimages and rituals magically solved the social problems they addressed or that the pilgrims were fully conscious of all elements and implications they contained. Even if ritual participants knew about the general ritual structure and were conscious of most of the desired effects of a ritual, there were always elements that escaped their attention. Like other, traditional rituals, these crafted ones maintained an impenetrable dimension. Dana had modeled the collective offering of menstrual blood on the Eucharist, but did not acknowledge it until I mentioned this possibility. When modeling their worldview or preparing new rituals, the pilgrims were conditioned by their Christian backgrounds but also by theories about religion and ritual derived from anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. By playing with symbols and ideals in a ritual context, pilgrims experienced themselves as the cocreators of the social and political reality they were part of, instead of passive pawns in a system they perceived as mutilating and oppressive. These ritual processes enabled them to reconceptualize and reshape their individual and social bodies, offered them insights about another possible world order, and allowed them to embody new gender identities. Through the use of an energy grammar the pilgrims also opposed classical oppositions such as sacred and profane, or body and soul,22 which they considered inherent to the patriarchal world order. As they saw it, if everything is made of energy and this energy is the manifestation of the divine forces pervading the phenomenological world, then everything is sacred. Although body and soul are two different entities they are made of energy and therefore interrelated, not separated or opposed. For the pilgrims, body and soul were in constant interaction, and the wellbeing of one could not be separated from that of the other. With their rituals and theories the pilgrims also deconstructed the opposition between ordinary and ritual acts or between science and religion. They would share Asad’s observation that it does not “make good sense to say that ritual behavior stands universally in opposition to behavior that is ordinary or pragmatic, any more than religion stands in contrast to reason or to (social) science”;23 but they made their point referring again to energy. If all acts could be explained in terms of manipulating energy then the difference between an ordinary and a ritual act was not substantial but rather contextual; for a spiritually inclined person sweeping the floor could entail a process of energy cleansing equivalent to that obtained through an elaborated ritual of purification. In a similar way the distinction /opposition between science and religion lost its meaning in a world made of energy, and both were described as different languages trying to make sense of reality. Shaping their spirituality and rituals the pilgrims formed part of an ongoing process of spiritual innovation, religious creativity, and contestation of a prevalent

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orthodox religion that is not new to anthropologists and religious scholars studying religious phenomena,24 Christianity,25 or Christian pilgrimages.26 What is different is the degree to which new rituals are created, the self-conscious reclamation of the right to spiritual and ritual creativity, and the constant auto-reflexive processes through which theories and practices are constantly put to test and adapted. Theories and rituals are selected more on the basis of efficacy than of authority,27 and even if the pilgrims tried to reconnect their spirituality with prepatriarchal societies and religions, they seemed to feel less compelled to justify their choices by referring to existing traditions. Ritual creativity and religious criticism are two interrelated processes that are key to understanding the pilgrims’ spirituality. Both these processes are made possible and legitimized through the use of an energy discourse, and both deserve more attention from observers of other contemporary forms of spirituality. Ritual creativity especially represents, in my opinion, a central element of contemporary spirituality—and for this reason crafted rituals should be observed as much as possible through participation and not only through references to descriptions. As we have seen in these crafted rituals, the script dimension is only secondary and what counts most is innovation; one can never know if the same ritual will be performed in the same way in the future. The examination of these new forms of ritualization has shown that participants do not passively accept the explanations and directions they obtain from their spiritual leaders. This observation may be due to the particular impromptu nature of these rituals and the pilgrims’ developed knowledge about ritualization, but it might be telling us something about the nature of ritual in general. Perhaps, as other ethnographies suggest,28 ritual participants in more traditional settings may be less passive and obedient than we suspect; and participants in crafted rituals may feel more at ease sharing their creative approach to ritual because they feel not constrained by the burden of a long-standing ritual tradition. Dana’s pilgrims, in particular, advocated a kind of feminism I described as body-related and opposed to mainstream feminism. In this context, their way of considering menstruation marked a difference. Janet Lee and Jennifer SasserCoen, in their 1996 book Blood Stories, cite Elisabeth Grosz29 on the “feminist dilemma of either addressing the [female] body as essentially different and celebrating these biological differences as sources of strength and power, or attending to the conflation of sex with gender and emphasizing the need to move beyond such prescriptive and troublesome categories.” In their study of menarche, the two authors propose to “move beyond these dualities” and recognize “the potential strengths of individual women who perceive their bleeding as connected to issues of power and efficacy experience in their lives.”30 Analyzing the menarche stories of the women they interviewed, they observed a high number of stories with “passive imagery,” suggesting a sense of “fragmentation

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between self and body.” In many stories there was a “sense of menarche as something a woman has to cope with, adjust to, and manage.”31 Older women spoke of menarche and of menopause “as something happening to them, rather as something wholly part of them.”32 Encouraged by Celso’s and Dana’s explanations and the group-offering of menstrual blood, Iberian and, to a lesser extent, Italian pilgrims created a way to go beyond this fragmentation and to see menstruation as part of a process of spiritual evolution that offered them special occasions to be grounded—or, in other words, to be in contact with their body and to connect with Mother Earth. Dana’s pilgrims considered menarche and menopause two important moments of women’s spiritual as well as biological lives, and thereby asserted their right to celebrate these events instead of merely coping with them. At a point in history when the contraceptive pill can eliminate real menstruation and another birth control pill that eliminates bleeding for a whole year is being prescribed in the United States, Europe, and other countries around the world,33 menstruation is an inevitable biological event no longer. It seems that from the moment women can choose whether to menstruate or not, menstruation becomes a political weapon used variously by different groups of women, as with abortion.34 Some women claim the right to stop experiencing painful periods or even to “save up on eggs”35 thanks to the new pill, while others warn of the potential consequences on women’s overall health and denounce this pill as yet more domination of the female body by doctors. There is still much to learn about the religious and social meaning of menstruation in Western as well as in non-Western countries. In the past, social scientists have contributed explanations of the cultural importance of menstruation36 and the prohibitions and rituals related to it. They have shown how the contraceptive pill inhibiting ovulation and therefore eliminating menstruation was created to mimic what was considered to be the normal monthly menstrual cycle.37 And they have challenged common assumptions by demonstrating that while menstruating once a month may be a shared experience for Western women living in postindustrial societies, it is not for other women because of frequent pregnancies and prolonged lactation periods causing amenorrhea.38 The debate about the new contraceptive pill designed to eliminate the period39 points again to the divergence between the biological fact of menstruation and the cultural meanings associated with it.40 Anthropologists can make an important contribution by examining the cultural and social background of this apparently revolutionary pill, and by discussing its role in the process of female emancipation and its different uses among feminist groups. The pilgrims did not consider menstruation an obstacle to women’s liberation, and tended to refuse the contraceptive pill and HRT therapy as selling them a false menstruation. They held that there was another possible solution to painful periods apart from painkillers or the contraceptive pill; instead of eliminating

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what had been called the curse, they transformed it into a blessing. Even though the pilgrims spoke of menstruation in spiritual terms, they were transforming it into a political object, the central point of a revolution allowing women to appropriate their bodies and to separate sexuality and reproduction without undermining the importance of menstruation. The pilgrims reclaimed menstruation and menstrual blood as parts of their body and not as functions and objects external to their bodies and studied in laboratories. The numerous different feminist movements, when confronted with the conflation of sex and gender, propose a variety of ways to attain equality between the sexes. Whereas some feminists, like the followers of queer theory41 consider gender as merely a construct subject to change, these pilgrims emphasized gender identities and differences, celebrating women’s capacity to create and procreate but most of all, to bleed without being wounded. With their pilgrimages they challenge the tourist /pilgrim divide, and superficial observers might see their trips as little more than self-centered, apolitical escapism. But close attention to the pilgrims’ theories, practices, life stories, and ritual narratives reveals not only an innovative approach to ritual and pilgrimage but also a critique of gender inequality, and more generally of the existing social and religious order.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Quoted material from all the pilgrims, unless indicated otherwise, derives from interviews. The translations of Spanish, Catalan, French or Italian quotes are mine. 2. Elsewhere (Fedele 2008) I pointed out the problems posed by the umbrella term New Age. Widely rejected by the social actors it is meant to describe, it is also debated among social scientists as the articles in the number 46 of the review Social Compass (1999) testify. For further discussion of the New Age label see below and also Bowman and Sutcliffe 2000: 1–13; Fedele and Knibbe forthcoming; Sutcliffe 2003:1–103; Wood 2007:1–40, 2010. 3. For a more detailed analysis of The Da Vinci Code see Ehrman 2004. On the relationship between this book and the Goddess movement see Badone 2008, Fedele 2008, and Salomonsen 2009. 4. Starbird 1993, 1998; Meurois-Givaudan 1989, 2000. 5. For ethnographic accounts on Neopaganism in the United Kingdom see Luhrmann 1989; Greenwood 2000; Blain 2002; Wallis 2003; and in Malta see Rountree 2010. 6. Some exceptions are: Lindquist 1997; Trulsson 2010. 7. E.g. Cousineau 1998. 8. Among others: Jencson 1989; Bell 1997:264; Grimes 2000:100–07; Salomonsen 2003; Pike 2001:20; Gilmore 2010:98–102. For a sourcebook of contemporary women’s rituals see Walker 1990. 9. Fellous 2001; Grimes 2000; Salomonsen 2002, 2003; Houseman 2007, 2010; Trulsson 2010. 10. Asad 1993:130. 11. Asad 1993:29. 12. Among others: Christian 1972, 1981, 1992; 1996, 2011; Bynum 1987, 1991. 13. Smith 1992:7–8; Badone and Roseman 2004:2. 14. On contemporary “lived religion” see McGuire 2008. 15. Claverie 1990, 1991, 2003. 16. During the research I did for my MA thesis (Fedele 2008) I focused on what I identified as the route or path of Mary Magdalene (el camino de María Magdalena), meaning both the path that reunites the places usually visited by pilgrims on their quest for Mary Magdalene, as well as the long interpretative path the figure of Magdalene had to go along during centuries of biblical exegesis. 17. For a more detailed analysis of the evolution of Mary Magdalene’s status and attributes as a Catholic saint, see: Saxer 1959; Malvern 1975; Dupperay 1989; Sebastiani 1992; Atwood 1993; Haskins 1993; Maisch 1996; Jansen 2000. 18. In a homily pronounced in the Vatican on Holy Friday 2007 and reported by one of Italy’s most important dailies, Father Raniero Cantalamessa emphasized that it was an erroneous interpretation that transformed the apostles’ apostle into a sinner. For the full text of the homily see http://www.korazym.org/news1.asp?Id=22398. Retrieved in May 2007. 277

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19. For a more detailed analysis of Mary Magdalene’s figure in the Gnostic Gospels see: Sebastiani 1992:64–75; Marjanen 1996; Jansen 2000:24–28; King 2003. 20. Schüssler Fiorenza 1983; Moltmann-Wendel 1980. 21. Haskins 1996:311–59, orig. 1983. 22. Mosco 1989; Haskins 1996:366–67, 381. 23. Lobineau 1956. 24. One of the documents cited by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (1982) as proof of the existence of the Priory of Sion is the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fabrication of the late nineteenth century describing a Jewish and Masonic plot for world domination, widely used as Nazi propaganda (Cohn 1966). 25. Scholars have since demonstrated the nonauthenticity of the secret dossiers donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale by Plantard’s collaborators. The corpus of theories regarding the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene will from now on be referred to as the Sangraal theories. For more details about what is generally known as the Priory of Sion hoax see Iannaccone 2004; Introvigne 2005; Laprévôte 1996 and the numerous documents available on Paul Smith’s website at http://priory-of-sion.com/. Consulted in May 2007. 26. Starbird 1993, 1998; Picknett 2003. For more analysis of this kind of literature about Mary Magdalene see Fedele 2008:167–95. 27. Starbird 1998; Kenyon and Sion 2002. 28. Bunyan 1678. 29. The basic elements the pilgrims use to construct their own holy family derive from a kind of spiritual-esoteric literature: a corpus of texts combining anthropology, psychology, history and religious studies. Elsewhere (2008) I have shown that the Sangraal theories and other books about Mary Magdalene formed part of a contemporary Christian mythology, providing Magdalene pilgrims with a basis for their theories and ritual practices. 30. For an example of a devotional pamphlet for pilgrims going to the Sainte-Baume see La Grotte de Sainte Marie Magdeleine en Provence (1920); I thank William Christian. 31. In Glastonbury, one of the major pilgrimage sites in Europe related to the New Age and Goddess movement (Prince and Riches 2000; Bowman 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 2000; Ivakhiv 2001, Trulsson 2010), locals told me about a Christian legend according to which Mary Magdalene also travelled to Glastonbury (England) with Joseph of Arimathea, who carried with him the Holy Grail. I do not have written referents for this legend. Magdalene pilgrimages to Glastonbury and the workshops about the saint in this town are not treated in this text. 32. Magliocco 2001:1. 33. Gimbutas 1974, 1989; Stone 1976; Spretnak 1978; Eisler 1987. 34. Articles contained in the Goodison and Morris’ collection (1999) show the weakness of Gimbutas’ theories, which were influenced by Bachofen 1861 and Graves 1948. For a detailed analysis of the myth of matriarchal prehistory see Eller 2000. 35. In her book, When God Was a Woman (1976), the mythologist Merlin Stone applies Gimbutas’ theories to the analysis of mythology and claims that the powerful and independent female goddesses, like Ishtar, Astarte, or Inanna, were gradually transformed into simple consorts of male gods. 36. Doubts about Gardner’s affirmations were raised by scholars such as Baker 1996; Kelly 1991. 37. For an extensive study of the origin and development of Neopaganism see Hutton 1999. For a description of this development from within the movement see Adler 1979. For an early study about witchcraft among Londoners see Luhrmann 1989. For ethnographic studies about Neopagans in the United States see Orion 1995; Berger 1999; Pike 2001; Salomonsen 2002; Magliocco 2001, 2004; Bado-Fralick 2005; in Great Britain, Harvey 1997; Greenwood 2000; in Australia, Hume 1997; in New Zealand, Rountree 2003. 38. As Merete D. Jakobsen has pointed out in a comparative study of shamanism among the Greenlandic people and modern practitioners of the Harner method, the length of the time for apprenticeship is one of the most striking differences between traditional

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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shamanism and neoshamanism. After having attended one weekend workshop on neoshamanism, participants are often encouraged to follow their own path and to apply the acquired shamanic skills in their everyday lives (Jakobsen 1999:162). On the Harner method see also Harner 1980 and Lindquist 2004, 2007. Albanese 1991:162–63. See for instance Matthews, Caitlin 1991; Matthews, John 1991a, 1991b. About Celtic shamanism see also Wallis 2003. Lindquist 1997. Albanese 1991:162. Jacques Galinier and Antoinette Molinié (2006) studied the movements of what they define as Neo-Indians in Peru and Mexico, analyzing their historical and political background. De la Peña 2002. Molinié and Galinier 2006:242–74. For other studies on alternative pilgrimages see: Ivakhiv 2001; Weibel 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2005; Rountree 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Badone 2008. In her study on pilgrims to Santiago Nancy Frey (1998:34, 244) already observed pilgrims influenced by the New Age movement. For Christian sites I found evidence of this kind of alternative pilgrimage by the 1970s, but more historical research needs to be done. Ivakhiv 2001:49. Ivakhiv 2001:4. Ivakhiv 2001:49. For a scientific rebuttal of the theory of ley lines see Williamson and Bellamy 1983; for a detailed discussion of the evolution of the theories about ley lines and of ley hunters see Ivakhiv 2001. In her analysis of alternative healing techniques in Brittany Ellen Badone (1991) refers to power points that are related to networks of telluric lines. Weibel 2001:106–07; Khalsa 1981. Ivakhiv 2001:3. The fact that Lovelock (1979) has chosen the name of a Greek goddess to identify the earth as a living being has led people to identify the planet with the Goddess and further on with the general idea of Mother Earth; see also Hanegraaff 1998:155–58, orig. 1996. Rountree 2006. Eller 2000:22–23. Rountree 2002a. Weibel 2001, 2005. Ivakhiv 2001:231, Rountree 2002b and Weibel 2001, 2005. Among others: Badone and Roseman 2004; Hermkens et al. 2009. Rountree 2002b. In her study Kidnapping the Virgin: the Reinterpretation of a Roman Catholic Shrine by Religious Creatives, Deana Weibel observes that the term New Age is now rather derogatory, and “it has become nearly impossible to find anyone who self-identifies as a ‘New Ager’” (2001:90). On the negative stereotypes related to New Agers in contemporary spirituality see also: Bender 2010:154. Pike 2001:144–46; see also Fedele and Knibbe (forthcoming). Matthew Wood even argues that “no case has been convincingly made that an area of religious belief and practice that can be described as New Age exists” (2007: 9). Luhrmann 1998, 2001; Greenwood 2000. Adler 1979; Orion 1995; York 1995; Lewis 1996; Berger 1999; Magliocco 2001, 2004; Pike 2001; Salomonsen 2002; Clifton and Harvey 2004. Hume 1997. Rountree 2003. Albanese 1991:176–78. Sjöö and Mor 1991:18, orig. 1987.

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71. Pilgrims and leaders maintained that a religion attributing a central role to a feminine divinity necessarily pointed towards a society where women played an important role. Marina Warner offers an alternative point of view, stating that “much thinking on the connection between mother goddesses and matriarchs is erroneous” and that “there is no logical equivalence in any society between exalted female objects of worship and a high position for women” (1983:283–84, orig. 1976) 72. Some recent historians have advanced quite different ideas. Clark, for instance, considers that Christianity enlarged the possibilities for women, allowing them more freedom from duties to family and State: “For the first time, women (some women) could reject marriage and childbearing, and live at home with their mothers, or in solitude, or in a community of women . . . Some such women at least, were acknowledged as members of the Church, given food and clothing from the benefactions of the rich people on whom they had no personal claim, rescued from dying on the streets, or even taken into women’s communities whose austerity was greater comfort than they had ever known” (1993:140–41). 73. Eller 1993:169–70. 74. Among others: Luckmann, 1967, 1990; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Berger et al. 2008: 14–15. 75. Heelas and Woodhead 2005:82–94. 76. Charles Taylor 1991:26; as cited in Heelas and Woodhead 2005:2. 77. Charles Taylor 1989, 1991, 2002; Eric Hobsbawm 1995; Ronald Inglehart 1997. 78. Among others: Fuller 2001; Heelas and Woodhead 2005. 79. These issues were addressed in the panel “Spirituality Against Religion: the Role of Gender and Power” at the Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held at Maynooth, Ireland, in 2010. I thank Kim Knibbe for her insights on these issues. See Fedele and Knibbe (forthcoming) for an edited volume based on the panel. 80. Matthew Wood (2007:15–39) makes a detailed critique of spiritual revolution theory, of Paul Heelas’ theories about the centrality of the Self in the New Age movement (e.g., 1996, 2002) and of other approaches to the New Age. See also Wood 2010. 81. See also Trulsson 2010. 82. Bender 2010:3. 83. Bender 2010:2. 84. As we will see in chaper 2, instead of offering a universal, monothetic definition of spirituality, I propose to use a polythetic definition (Needham 1975; Southwold 1978). 85. Asad 1993. 86. Among others: Lambek 1993; Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005; Cannell 2006; Coleman and Lindquist 2008; Mc Guire 2008; Fedele and Llera Blanes 2011. 87. Among others: Bynum 1987, 1991; Brown 1981, Christian 1992, 1996; Jansen 2000. 88. Salomonsen 2002:235. 89. Turner and Turner 1978. 90. Jakobsen 1999; De la Peña 1999; Pike 2001:123–25; Galinier and Molinié 2006. 91. Asad 1993:55–79, 130 and Bell 1989, 1992:13–30. 92. Asad 1993:56–58. 93. Asad 1993:79. 94. Turner 1968, 1974; Tambiah 1981, 1990; Geertz 1973. 95. Bell 1997:263–64. 96. Bell 1997: 264. 97. Turner 1964:20–51, 1973:1100–05. I thank Eric Venbrux for suggesting this reference to Turner’s analysis of symbols in African ritual. 98. Turner 1973:1100. 99. Thereby confirming the tendency to reject the spiritual importance of physical suffering in a Christian context evidenced by Asad (1993:46) in contemporary Christianity. See also chapter III below and Tomasi 2002. 100. Bell 1990:299. 101. Bell 1989:33. 102. Bell 1990:310.

Note s to Pag e s 21 – 3 2 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

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Bell 1989, 1990, 1992. Foucault 1972, 1977, 1979, 1980. Bourdieu 1977, 1979. Claverie 2003:25–47. Pragmatic sociology, also described as sociologie de la critique (sociology of criticism), developed starting in the mid 1980s with the work of Luc Boltanski, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and Laurent Thévenot. For an overview see: Boltanski 1990; Boltanski and Thévenot 1991; Breviglieri and Stavo-Debauge 1999; Breviglieri et al. 2009. On the critical capacity of social actors see: Boltanski 2009; Boltanski and Thévenot 1999, 2000. Bender emphasized how spiritual practitioners in the United States spent a lot of time debating, evaluating and pondering the authenticity of their experiences (2010:2). Asad 1993:134. Bell 1997; Grimes 1990, 2000, 2006. Bell 1989. See chapter 5 for more details on the changes in the Christian Eucharist and the ritual inversion of this model operated by Spanish and Catalan pilgrims. Among others: Brown 1997:X–XI; Pike 2001:XV–XVI; Magliocco 2004:15–17. Wood 2007:7–9; Bender 2010:3. Fedele 2008:29–30. Bender 2010:15. Bender 2010:154. Grimes 2000:10. Houseman 2007, 2010. Mainly Van Gennep 1908; Turner and Turner 1978. As most Iberian and Italian pilgrims were not able to read English texts, I cited only from English books that had either been translated into Italian and Spanish, or had inspired Italian or Spanish authors or other, translated, authors. Unfortunately, in this kind of literature authors do not always cite the texts they refer to and only occasionally include a bibliography. See Berliner and Sarró 2007. Luhrmann 2005, 2007, 2011. Prat 1997. Salomonsen 2002:10. Mernissi 1975. Claverie 2003:51–105.

Chapter 1 1. Romería: Spanish word for collective yearly pilgrimages. 2. In the following text I will refer to Saint-Maximin-en-Provence simply as Saint-Maximin (which is the way local people and pilgrims referred to it), and to La Sainte-Baume as the Sainte-Baume. 3. See also Badone 2008. 4. Adler 1986:14–24, orig. 1979. 5. Where I had to change pilgrims’ names I tried to maintain in some way the characteristics of the name that seemed relevant for reasons mentioned by the pilgrim. I soon discovered that pilgrims were quite self-conscious about their names’ meanings and the biblical, mythological or historical figures related to it. “Every name has its energy,” they often repeated, sometimes citing the Latin proverb nomen est omen, name is destiny. In the Spanish and Catalan group the importance of the person’s name was clearly spelled out by the group’s leader. Many Spanish or Catalan women had compound names including that of Mary. Some were names for important moments of the Virgin’s life such as: “Asunción” (Mary’s ascent to heaven) or “Immaculada Concepción” (Mary’s conception by St. Anne). Normally these women did not use the name María in their everyday life. So,

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

for instance, somebody whose complete name was “María del Carmen,” would be called simply “Carmen” (if she were Spanish) or “Carme” (if she were Catalan). I tried to maintain this characteristic giving these women fictive names related to the Virgin, like “Lourdes.” A few women were named for particular stages of Christ’s life, so I used Encarnación (Christ’s incarnation), for one pilgrim. During the pilgrimage, and in some workshops, these women were told that it was important to use their complete first name. They learned to appreciate the fact that they had been given the name of the Virgin Mary, and when they had to present themselves to the group they tended to use their entire name. Often, when they did not act this way, somebody would invite them to spell out their complete name. A Course in Miracles was written by Helen Schucman and William Thetford through a particular form of channeling and published in 1975 by the Foundation for Inner Peace. It contains the messages Jesus Christ supposedly passed on to the authors and proposes an alternative vision of the Christian message. Available for sale since 1976, it is used in study groups mainly in Europe and the United States. For more details see Hanegraaff 1998:37–38, orig. 1996; Melton et al. 1990:129–32. Reiki is a healing technique that was widely used among Magdalene pilgrims. The founder of this technique is allegedly the Japanese Mikao Usui and the practitioners transmit healing energy through the laying on of hands. More expert practitioners can also use symbols that allow them to send healing energy to faraway persons, places or situations. See also Albanese 1991:186–90 and Wood 2007:8–9. Heelas and Woodhead 2005. In the Italian flyer, Mary Magdalene did not appear as the only central figure of the trip, but when I spoke to the four organizers, or the pilgrims, they normally referred to it as the trip of the Magdalene or the trip to France. They did not always call it a pilgrimage, even though the trip was clearly described as such in the program. In his book Negli occhi dello sciamano. Sul sentiero sacro degli Inca (1998) Huarache Mamani mentions Celso, who organized the shaman’s workshops in Italy, and thereby laid the foundations for Mamani’s popularity. This same author also wrote a book about an Andean prophecy foretelling the reawakening of the feminine spirit (2000). See also http://www. mamani-inca.com/. Consulted in August 2007. It is difficult to transpose the Italian title of laurea into the international system, it is often considered as a BA but is actually more than that as is implies a four or five-year study and an elaborate thesis. In Italy and in Spain, seminars and workshops about what is generally identified under the umbrella term “alternative spirituality” are often organized without the intervention of any legally constituted association. The leader of Goddess Wood was the only one to ask me to change her name and I also had to use a pseudonym for her group. For an analysis of the relationship between contemporary spirituality and ecology see Bron Taylor’s study (2010) about what he identifies as “dark green religion.” For the creation of this text Dana was influenced by Diane Stein 1987 and Zsusanna Budapest 1986, 1991. This text arrived via email to the women who had already participated in the Goddess Wood’s activities. Roger had created a company through which he could organize his workshops, conferences and trips. A British woman who was responsible for his workshops and trips in Europe, helped him to lead the Magdalenetour. For more details about the Magdalene Conference and his workshops and tours see Roger’s website: http:www.rogerwoolger.com and http://www.magdalenetours.com. Consulted in June 2006. E.g., Starbird 1993; Picknett and Prince 1997; Picknett 2003. I will cite freely from the biographical sketch in Regression Therapy: A Handbook for Professionals (Winafred Blake 1993:216–10). Heelas 1996:19. For more details see http://www.magdalenetours.com. Consulted in June 2006. Roger’s reading list was divided into eleven parts: “General Introductions to the Middle Ages (1100–1350), Hard-to-Find Essays and Articles, Black Madonnas and the Cult of the

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

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Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Gnostic Christianity, The Holy Grail and Arthurian Romance, The Troubadours and Medieval Music, The Cathars and the Albigesian Crusade, The Knights Templar, the Order of Sion and Underground Traditions, Medieval Witchcraft and Persecution, Films about/inspired by the Middle Ages.” It included more than sixty books. The last appendix displayed a selection of the wide-ranging bibliography about Mary Magdalene that appeared on the most complete site about Mary Magdalene in this context (www. magdalene.org). In 2005, most book titles listed on the website were followed by a brief comment. Santo Daime is a worldwide spiritual movement since the 1990s which was founded in the 1930s by Raimundo Irineu Serra. This spiritual practice involves the use of the psychotropic drink ayahuasca and of cannabis. Its pantheon consists of Christian figures as well as African and South American deities. For a case study of Santo Daime in an European setting, see Groisman 2000. Crystal therapy is a generic term to describe different ways of using crystals to enhance a person’s well being. Specific crystals are supposed to have a particular healing influence on different parts of the body. During the healing sessions with crystals I witnessed, these were applied directly to the patient’s body or held at a small distance from it, the latter supposedly acting upon the body’s energy field. The confusion between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene happened often, and Spanish and Catalan pilgrims in particular sometimes had trouble separating two figures they considered to be two emanations of the same Goddess. In his study The New Age Movement. The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (1996) Paul Heelas analysed in more detail the concepts of ego and Self and identified the importance attributed to the Self as one of the main characteristics of the New Age movement. See also Heelas and Woodhead 2005. Heelas 1996; see also Heelas and Woodhead 2005.

Chapter 2 1. For techniques for receiving and releasing energy see chapter 3. 2. Robert Bly’s website characterizes him as a poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement.” See http://www.robertbly.com. Retrieved in July 2007. See also Bell 1997:238–39. 3. Some of the Italian pilgrims had participated in one of Celso’s Masculine—Feminine workshops based particularly on Jung’s theory postulating the existence of an unconscious feminine side (anima) in every man and an unconscious masculine side (animus) in every woman. Workshop exercises were intended to allow participants to acknowledge and contact this anima and animus. Each had a particular energy related to it and, by learning to feel and distinguish these two energies, one could get in touch with one’s masculine or feminine side. Feminine places were usually linked to the elements of earth or water, i.e., caves, waterfalls, springs, and the sea. Masculine places tended to be linked to the elements of air and fire, for example windy places or volcanos. Mountains, or other high places were generally considered to be related to ascending masculine energy, whereas underground caves were related to the descending, grounding female energy. During the pilgrimage Celso explicitly referred to Jung 1942, 1988. 4. See on this topic Brown (1997:48; 96–102), who has observed a similar overemphasis among channels in the United States in the 1990s. He writes: “The purpose of channeling— and by extension, other forms of New Age spirituality—is to bring together elements of life ripped apart by Western civilization: science and religion, body and soul, culture and nature, male and female, reason and intuition, thought and matter. Where one half of a dichotomy has overpowered the other, channeling tries to strengthen the weaker partner” (Brown 1997:48). 5. Cynthia Eller’s Living in the Lap of the Goddess. The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (1993) was praised by the two main authors of the movement Dana relied upon: Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest (see back cover of the 1993 edition). 6. Sjöö and Mor 1991:18.

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7. Sjöö and Mor 1991:19–20. 8. I draw here and in Fedele (2008:126–40) on David Riches and Ruth Prince’s analysis of the New Age movement in Glastonbury (2000:54–56). The authors refer to Needham’s concept of a polythetic class (1975) and Southwold’s use of it to define the concept of religion. Southwold writes: “A phenomenon may be treated as a member of the class if it possesses only some of the attributes. Since different members of the class may possess different selections form the bundle of attributes, there is no guarantee that any one of these attributes is common to all the members. Indeed a class must be regarded as polythetic when there is no attribute which is both common to all members and important to understanding them” (1975:309). 9. In a previous work I proposed eight attributes to describe the polythetic class of feminist spirituality (Fedele 2008:160–65). Here, referring in detail to the pilgrims’ spirituality, I changed some points and referred also to criteria suggested by Cynthia Eller (1993) and Heelas and Woodhead (2005). 10. Eller 1993:6. 11. Heelas and Woodhead 2005:78–90. 12. See also my forthcoming chapter “The Metamorphoses of Neopaganism in Tradititonally Catholic Countries of Southern Europe.” 13. Based on conversations with Californian Neopagans in 2010 and with scholars specialized on Neopaganism, it appears that a reevaluation and incorporation of Christian figures, places, and symbols has taken place in contemporary Pagan discourses and rituals. This shift is also evident in texts such as Christo-Paganism: an Inclusive Path (Higginbotham and Higginbotham 2009). I am grateful to Sarah Pike for pointing out this change when acting as a discussant for my paper at the joint meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and the Society for Pyschological Anthropology at Asilomar, CA in March 2009. 14. Eller 2000:3. 15. Eller 2000:14. 16. Eller (2000:60) mentions that there are feminist spiritualists who do not regard maleness as a problem and refers precisely to Roger and Jennifer Woolger’s book about the Goddess psychology. 17. English speaking pilgrims used the term Mother Mary more frequently, Spanish and Catalan pilgrims mostly referred to her respectively as la Virgen or la Verge, and Italians called her mostly la Madonna. 18. Woolger and Woolger 1990; Bolen 1984, 1989. Several pilgrims also knew Bolen’s text on attaining menopause (2003). 19. Woolger and Woolger 1994:7–8; orig. 1990. 20. Woolger and Woolger 1994:7–8. 21. Woolger and Woolger 1994:14–16. The authors refer to Mary Daly and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973). 22. Woolger and Woolger 1994:16–17. 23. Woolger 2005. 24. Pilgrims did not describe masculine figures in the same way. I never heard Jesus being described as an archetype even though Jean Shinoda Bolen published a book about male god archetypes taken from Greek mythology (1989). 25. Warner 1983:225, orig. 1976. 26. All three leaders spoke of Magdalene as an archetype. Being a Jungian analyst, Roger was the most knowledgeable about archetypes and their power, and used the word archetype as a specifically psychological term. Celso and Dana often used archetype and model interchangeably, and used both in a context that was not always clearly related to psychology. 27. Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln 1982; Starbird 1993, 1998; Picknett and Prince 1997; Picknett 2003; Brown 2003. 28. Warner 1983:235. 29. Elsewhere, I have focused on the spiritual-esoteric literature around Magdalene from the 1980s on, treating these stories as part of a body of contemporary Christian mythologies (Fedele 2008). I compared the attributes of the contemporary Magdalene in The Da Vinci

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

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Code (2003) with previous Magdalenes going back to the gospels, and showed that, not only in the past, but also in the present, authors tended to put a man by Magdalene’s side. The book also included a presentation of the first part of my fieldwork with Mary Magdalene pilgrims, including Celso’s group and some pilgrims travelling independently in 2003. The pilgrims described did not know The Da Vinci Code and most of them considered Magdalene the occasional or stable companion of Jesus but not his legitimate wife. Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln 1982; Brown 2003. For a more favorable analysis of the feminist message of The Da Vinci Code see Salomonsen 2009. Warner 1983:67. Warner 1983:153. Haskins 1996:166, orig. 1983; Jansen 2000:145–96. Warner 1976:XXIV. Speaking of the figure of the whore during the first Italian gathering, Celso referred to the Lilith archetype. Lilith, the first wife of Adam, refused to lie below him while they were making love. Celso considered Lilith to be a dark model of femininity, diametrically opposed to that of the virgin, referring to something similar to Roger’s concept of a Madonna-whore split. See among others: Orsi 1985; Christian 1972, 1996; Claverie 2003; Dubisch 1995. Jansen 2000. See for instance Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987). These authors quote from Erich Neumann 1955; Robert Graves 1948; Margaret Murray 1921; and Marija Gimbutas 1974. Stone 1976: XI. Stone 1976:158–59. See on this: Fedele 2006a. The Moon under Her Feet is the title of a novel by Clysta Kinstler (1989) characterizing Mary Magdalene as a priestess and a sacred prostitute. In describing the usage of terms, rituals and theories from Peru and Mexico, I chose to use the pilgrims’ and their leaders’ terminology. I will therefore refer here to the traditions addressed by Celso and Dana, respectively, as Andean tradition and Conchero tradition (or movement) and to Nanita and Don Benito as native teachers in order to distinguish them from Clara, Emilio Fiel, and Juan Nuñez Del Prado who were seen as Westerners and nonnatives. Whereas Juan, Emilio Fiel, and Nanita could be considered public figures who had been referred to in books about native spirituality (Jenkins 1997; Fiel 1992) and even anthropological research (Galinier and Molinié 2006; De la Peña 1999, 2002), Clara maintained a certain ideological distance from the revitalization of the Conchero movement and I therefore decided to use a pseudonym for her. Joan Muela conducted fieldwork among a Conchero group in Catalonia but has not published on this subject. I am grateful to him for sharing his findings with me and for his suggestions. I will mainly use Francisco de la Peña’s study in order to introduce the Conchero and the neo-Conchero movement. For other analysis of the Mexican Concheros see Stone 1975; and Rostas 1996, 1998. Francisco de la Peña has made a detailed analysis of what he identifies as the “movement of mexicanity” (1999; 2002). The Mexican anthropologist identifies Nanita (Guadalupe Jiménez Sanabria) as one of the leaders (1999:74, 79) of the Conchero-Mexicanist groups (1999:73–90) and describes a variety he identifies as neo-Conchera (1999:80) As the author pointed out, the Conchero movement in Mexico combines with Catholicism certain elements of the pre-Hispanic belief system, such as circular dances associated with the sun, a quaternary symbolism, the costumes and instruments, certain ritual objects and a belief in the magical power of the dance (1999:45). De la Peña 1999:62. De la Peña 1999:75–79. De la Peña considered Antonio Velasco Piña (1987, 1990) to be one of the sources of inspiration for the neo-Concheros. His name was never mentioned

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51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

by Clara or Dana, but Clara often repeated his theories about Regina (1999:237–50) and the awakening of the cult to the Feminine in Latin America. Velasco Piña further described Regina as a dakini, a term that will be explored more fully in Dana’s interpretation of Mary Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood. The importance of feminine power is a key point in the discourse of both Velasco Piña and Fiel. Like Juan Nuñez Del Prado, they held that in the pre-Hispanic world there was sexual equality (De la Peña 1999:257) and that women played an important political and spiritual role. De la Peña stated that a woman could not become a captain or the highest leader of the group. However, according to Clara, Nanita did become a captain, thereby initiating a mayor departure from Conchero tradition. The leader of the Spanish Conchero movement, Emilio Fiel, has certainly emphasized the importance of women. During the velación I attended in Montserrat in 2005 he had even modified the typical Conchero greeting Él es Dios (He is God) by alternating the shouting with a feminine version Ella es Dios (She is God). For more information about Emilio Fiel see http://www.emiliofiel.com/. For specific information about the Spanish Conchero mesas, see http://www.emiliofiel.com/proyectos2.htm. Consulted in August 2007. Juan is the son of the anthropologist Óscar Nuñez Del Prado, who is well known in Peru for discovering, together with a group of researchers, a Q’ero community in 1955 and finding the text of a messianic prophecy of the return of the Inca (see Galinier and Molinié 2006:161–64; 204–06). Since his meeting with this Peruvian anthropologist in 1998, Celso dedicated several years to learning and spreading Juan’s teachings and summarized its basic tenets in a book he wrote with Nityama Masetti: Walking Through the Living Cosmos. A Guide to the Energetic and Spiritual Techniques of the Andes [my translation] (Nuñez Del Prado 1998). In order to explain Juan’s adaptation of the teachings he says he received from Don Benito and other indigenous teachers, I will refer to this book and to my own experiences in Juan and Celso’s workshops. I will use here the transcription of Quechua terms as done by Celso following Juan Nuñez Del Prado’s advice (1998). Galinier and Molinié 2006:204–06. For a study of the Peruvian mystical tourist industry, see Hill 2008. In the late 1960s and the 1970s Carlos Castaneda’s books attained popularity, and the teachings of Don Juan (1968) and other indigenous Mexican shamans described by the Mexican author influenced several generations. Soon doubts arouse about the authenticity of Castaneda’s ethnological findings and the real existence of the shamans he described. The psychologist Richard De Mille (1976, 1980) has systematically analysed Castaneda’s texts. Robert Wallis, an archeologist and practitioner, offers an insider’s perspective on these controversies (2003:195–226). Galinier and Molinié 2006. Pike 2001:123–54. Pike 2001:125–56. Rose 1992. Pike cites Patricia Cummings (1992), a lawyer representing traditional Native Americans in their struggle to protect sacred sites and preserve their cultures. Pike 2001:143. Pike 2001:146. Pike 2001:153.

Chapter 3 1. Celso referred to the fact that 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 see http://www.ecomusee-sainte-baume. asso.fr. Retrieved on May 10, 2010. 2. Turner 1967.

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3. Galinier and Molinié 2006:161–64. 4. Lindquist 1997. 5. Popular books describing the human energy field and its functions and dysfunctions are Barbara Ann Brennan’s Hands of Light 1987 and Light Emerging 1993. 6. On the use of energy see also Bender 2010:28. 7. Jansen 2000:240–44. 8. Asad 1993:46. 9. For example the pilgrims shared with other contenmporary Christian movements the emphasis on the direct experience of divine forces (Luhrmann 2005, 2007, 2012; Csordas 1994, 1997, 2002). Such coincidence may also partly derive from the fact that Celso in particular and his teacher Juan Nuñez Del Prado had been influenced by Christian Charismatic movements in Latin America. 10. I am grateful to Cristina Toren, who during a chance meeting in the British Library in April 2006 drew my attention to this difference between initiation rituals in traditional societies and the pilgrims’ way of approaching a ritual. 11. We will consider this and other offerings of menstrual blood to Mother Earth performed by Dana’s pilgrims in more detail in chapter 5. 12. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; see also Bell 1992. 13. Daniel Meurois and Anne Givaudan used to sign their books as “Anne and Daniel MeuroisGivaudan.” Together they wrote two books about Jesus and his disciples in which Magdalene plays an important role (1984, 1989). L’Évangile de Marie-Madeleine (The Gospel of Mary Magdalene) was written by Daniel Meurois alone (2000) who nevertheless signed it as Daniel Meurois-Givaudan. At the time of writing the two authors were divorced and separately publishing books under their own, now unhypenated, names. 14. As we will see in chapter 5, this sense of spiritual sisterhood and the subversion of Catholic rituals culminated in the most important ceremony of the pilgrimage, the offering of menstrual blood to the Earth, designed as a feminine counterpart to the Catholic Eucharist. 15. Dana did not remember exactly where she got this information. Probably her direct or indirect source was Robert Graves’ The White Goddess where the author, referring to the Sumerian word “An” meaning heaven, states that if one wanted to find a simple, all-encompassing name for the Goddess this would most probably be “Anna” (2000:371–72, orig. 1948). 16. E.g., Emily Martin 1987; Thomas Laqueur 1990; Françoise Heritier 1996, 2002. About the chattiness of women see Kaufmann 2010:105, orig. 2004. 17. According to various accounts Magdalene spent thirty years in the cave, or thirty-three, like the age of Christ when he died. 18. Guido Mina di Sospiro 2001. 19. Warner 1976. 20. Lévi-Strauss 1958:251. 21. Fedele 2006a. 22. Magdalene’s alleged sense of humor and the importance she seemed to give to laughter were clearly present in Daniel Meurois-Givaudan’s channeled Magdalene and particularly in the excerpt read by Celso to his pilgrims on their way up to Saint-Pilon (Meurois-Givaudan 2000). 23. In Dana’s interpretation Magdalene is identified with all the women who anoint Jesus in the gospels: Mary of Bethany, the sinner in the house of the Pharisee (Luke 7:37–8) and the nameless woman anointing Jesus’s feet and head (Mark 14, 3–9 and Matthew 26:6–13). 24. Jansen 2000:32–35. 25. Jansen 2000:28. 26. Iberian pilgrims and Dana herself made a creative use of the concept of archetype, sometimes speaking of Magdalene herself as an archetype, and sometimes speaking of her as an expression of the archetype of the lover. 27. For more details see Fedele 2009.

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28. Matrix: in Spanish the word matriz is sometimes used to speak about the uterus. I decided to use this term in English as well because the image of the matrix turned out to be particularly relevant. When Estrella spoke about the matrix and what she felt there, she referred exclusively to the uterus, not to a more generic part including all the female reproductive organs. 29. Telecinco is a Spanish TV channel at that time generally consided to have low quality programs and to be a prime example of “trash culture.” 30. I did not attend this ceremony in 2005, but I doubt that there were cardinals in the procession. Probably the men described by Estrella were bishops and priests wearing ceremonial robes. 31. Montserrat is a mountain that is the site of Catalonia’s most important shrine, dedicated to Mary. 32. There are more details about Leonard’s life and his involvement in the Liberal Catholic Church in the next chapter. 33. Leonard referred here to Jean-Yves Leloup’s commented version of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (1997). 34. In her analysis of dark, destructive images of the Goddess among Londoners practicing witchcraft Luhrmann cites Frances, who also criticizes Christianity’s negation of darkness (2001:125). 35. This poem is reproduced with the permission of the author, Margot Henderson. 36. On the supposed opposition between spirituality and religion and its meaning in contemporary spiritualities see the introduction and also Fedele and Knibbe (forthcoming).

Chapter 4 1. For an analysis of the influence of psychology and especially of Jungian texts on contemporary spiritualities see Noll 1994; Hanegraaff 1998:482–513, orig. 1996 and Segal 2000. 2. Compare Weibel 2005:131. 3. Brown 1997:47. 4. For a detailed analysis of ideas related to past life therapy and the historical development of the theories related to it, see Melton et al. 1990:341–50; about reincarnation, see pp. 384–90. Bowman identifies belief in past lives as one of the major trends in contemporary spirituality (2000:90–91). Bender offers a detailed analysis of practitioners of alternative spirituality and their different approaches to past lives 2010: 119–52. 5. I used the 1999 edition. 6. Woolger 1999:15. 7. Woolger 1999:33. 8. Woolger 1999:84. 9. Woolger 1999:312–13. 10. Woolger 1999:81–82, emphasis in the original text. 11. Woolger 1999:191–92. 12. Woolger 1999:192. 13. For the conflict between Christian values and the new kind of ideas related to feminist spirituality see as well Fedele 2006a, where I briefly described Luciana’s case. 14. Luciana here plays with the Italian concept of inhibitory brakes (freno inibitore), speaking of an inquisitory brake related to the Catholic Inquisition that persecuted witches. 15. To read more in detail about the Christian base communities see http://www.cdbitalia.it, consulted in May 2005. 16. Compare Eller 1993:198. 17. Lemuria is believed to be a continent like Atlantis that existed in ancient times but sank beneath the ocean. 18. For a detailed analysis of reencounters with past life acquaintances and the meaning attributed to them see Bender 2010:120–28. 19. Bender 2010:138. 20. Bender 2010:139–52.

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Chapter 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

Fedele 2006b. Shuttle and Redgrove 1978. Owen 1991. Fedele 2006a. Layard 1944, 1972, 1975. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:17, orig. 1978. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:20. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:21, 29. Bettelheim 1954; other authors referred to in this part are James Frazer 1911–15; Robert Briffault 1927 and Simone de Beauvoir 1949. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:58–68. Ulanov 1971; Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:109–10. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:120. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:198. In her The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (1996) Diane Purkiss refers to a “Myth of the Burning Times” and argues that “there is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives . . . There is little evidence that convicted witches were invariably unmarried or sexually ‘liberated’ or lesbian . . . Men were not responsible for all accusations; many, perhaps even most, witches were accused by women . . . The Inquisition, except in a few areas where the local inquisitor was especially zealous, was more lenient about witchcraft cases than the secular courts” (1996:7–8). Among others: Martin 1987; Fausto-Sterling 1986; Héritier 1996. Some of the books Dana referred to were: De Beauvoir 1949; Engels 1884 and Bachofen 1861. In the early 1990s, when Dana started her research about menstruation, only a few books about feminist spirituality had been translated into Spanish, she referred mainly to Diane Stein The Women’s Spirituality Book (1987) and Zsuzsanna Budapest, Grandmother Moon: Lunar Magic in Our Lives (1991). The term “indigenous people” (los indígenas) and its feminine counterpart, las mujeres indígenas, was used to refer to people native to Central and South America, whereas the term nativos americanos referred to Native American in general. I cite here from the 1984 edition, p. 44. Owen 1991. Owen 1991. Fedele 2006b. Ensler 2004:43–50, orig. 1998. Article retrieved in January 2007 from http://www.holysmoke.org/fem/fem0426.htm. One is the Menstrual Health Foundation in Sebastopol, California, founded by Tamara Slayton, one of the women whose story Lara Owen tells in her book (1993:117–24). See http://www.redwebfoundation.org , consulted June 2007. Eller 1993:86. Eller 1993:87. Stein 1987:119. Eller 1993:168. Roberts 1994. See on this topic Brown 1997:98–100 who has observed similar beliefs about feminism among channels in the United Sates in the 1990s. One of Brown’s female informants also spoke of memories from past lives of “communing with women and doing Moon Lodges” (1997:98). I will refer here to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the dakinis, and other figures and rituals referred to by Dana in the way she presented them to me. Lara Owen mentioned to me Tsultrim Allione’s Women of Wisdom (1984) as a source about dakinis. About the relationship between Paganism and Tibetan Buddhism see: Samuel 1998.

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35. Stefania Giuliani has analyzed the figure of Mary Magdalene from a Jungian perspective. She described the Christian Magdalene as an incomplete self, the product of the JudeoChristian tradition that considers the Feminine as inferior and compared it with that of the dakini in Tibetan Tantra tradition (1989: 257–67). 36. The red dakini Dana showed me can be see on the website at http://www.dakini.demon. co.uk/. Consulted in June 2006. 37. Owen 1993:37. 38. Massimo Scaligero (1906–1980) was an influential figure of the esoteric Italy of the 1970s and 1980s who tried to combine principles derived from Rosicrucianism, Anthroposophy and Yoga. 39. Coleman 2009. 40. Coleman 2009:43. 41. Among others: Claverie 2003; Coleman and Elsner 1998; Coleman 2009; Frey 1998. 42. Coleman (2009:49) refers to a similar transformative process related to ritual, referring to the mimetic faculty of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Walsingham (UK) and drawing on Michael Taussig’s study on mimesis 1993. 43. For a detailed analysis of the spiritual practitioners’ use of scientific terms, see Bender 2010:26, 28, 30, 168. 44. Coleman 2009. 45. Gillian MacBeth-Louthan, text from the July 2004 newsletter, retrieved in February 2005 from http://www.thequantumawakening.com. A Spanish translation of the newsletter was available on the website. 46. Bell 1997:225, 237–42. 47. Bell 1997:224. 48. Bell 1997:240. 49. Bell 1997:241. 50. Pike (2001) subtitled her book on Pagan festivals in the United States Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. 51. See chapter 3 in this volume. 52. As Bell observed in the case of invented rituals, correct performance is not so important but there is increased pressure to “show that it ‘works’” (1997:241). 53. For more on Ruth’s life story see the next chapter. 54. Coleman 2009. 55. Salomonsen (2009:208) refers to the image of an “earthly Matrix/Creatrix” or “immanent Goddess” among the reclaiming witches she studied. 56. After several attempts to speak to this Mexican woman and to discover which indigenous Mexican group she actually referred to, I finally desisted. Abuela Margarita was interviewed by the most important newspaper in Barcelona, La Vanguardia (Sanchís 2005). During the Feria de la Tierra in April 2005 she made a public offering of menstrual blood to Mother Earth. 57. I will not describe in detail how Estrella invoked the spirits of the seven directions, created the protection circle, and subsequently said goodbye to these spirits and closed the circle as I want to focus on the act itself of offering the blood. Estrella told me that she followed no set ritual schema for these opening and closing procedures. The strategies she used to create a safe and sacred space varied over time but always implied the sequences of creating a protection circle and invoking the directions. 58. For other examples see Fellous 2001:119–23; Houseman 2007, 2010; Salomonsen 2002:214–47, 2003; Trulsson 2010:298–334. 59. Héritier 1996. 60. Héritier 1996:26. 61. Héritier 1996:234–35. 62. Fedele 2006a. 63. Comaroff 1985:9. 64. Comaroff 1985:252–53. 65. Rousseau 2005.

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66. Rousseau 2005:8–10. 67. Bynum 1991:113–14. 68. Explaining her reasons for joining the pilgrimage, Carme spoke of this image on Dana’s altar and the vision she had had of Mary Magdalene as the saint in the icon. 69. I repeatedly tried to contact the monastery in order to verify the presence of this icon and the existence of a legend associated to it but to no avail. I was not able to locate any further information about the legend of Mary Magdalene and an egg turning red mentioned by Nancy Qualls-Corbett and by Dana. The image on Dana’s card also appears in a black and white version at http://www.holy-transfiguration.org/library_en/saints_magdalena.html (accessed April 2012). In Dana’s version the image was in red. 70. Qualls-Corbett 1988:148–51. 71. Buckley and Gottlieb 1988:4. 72. Harris 1977:85; Young and Bacdayan 1965. 73. Bettelheim 1954. 74. Steiner 1956; Buckley and Gottlieb 1988:6. 75. Buckley and Gottlieb 1988:7. 76. Owen 1993:46. 77. Another influential book was Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent (1997), in which the author describes the life of the Jewish women of the family of Jacob, the third of the Hebrew patriarchs, son of Isaac and Rebecca, and especially their practices when they retired for menstrual seclusion or child birth to the red tent. 78. Mc Clintock 1971. 79. Buckley 1988:190–91. 80. Harrell 1981. 81. In a recent book neither the pilgrims nor leaders seemed to know, entitled The Woman in the Shaman’s Body. Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine (2005) anthropologist Barbara Tedlock argues: “Female hormones play a central role in women’s shamanic abilities. Just before and during menstruation women experience their strongest healing and oraculous powers. Moods swings and heightened sensitivity at this time of the month—which in the west have been labeled premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and treated as illness—are actually manifestations of an altered state of consciousness made possible by female biology” (2005:173). In the third part of the book dedicated to “The Female Cycle: Menstruation, Birth and Creation,” she explores the shamanic use of menstrual blood and also refers to women in the goddess spirituality movement, gathering menstrual blood to feed houseplants or “drip it on paper as works of art that they exhibit publicly” (2005:203). She concludes: “Women today, regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliations, might do well to develop moon time rituals celebrating the divine feminine. During this special period they might make pilgrimages to sacred locations to come into harmony with their natural biorhythms and menstrual flows” (2005:203). 82. See Hermkens and Venbrux (2011:82) for an example of how menstrual blood is used as a symbol of fertility and creativity. 83. The articles edited by Van de Walle and Renne (2001) in Regulating Menstruation. Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, explore “the ambiguity of women’s intentions” when they do something to restore their menses (2001:XIII). 84. E.g.: Noble 1996:34, orig. 1991; Gray and Gray 1996:59–62, orig. 1994. 85. I thank the participants in Michael Houseman seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études for pointing out this possibility to me in March 2006. 86. Salomonsen 2002:225–27. 87. Harrell 1981. 88. Harrell 1981:817. 89. Martin 1988:161–85. 90. Martin 1988:165. 91. Martin 1988:177. 92. Salomonsen 2002; Fellous 2001. Trulsson describes a first blood ceremony and a croning ceremony 2010:301–09.

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93. Houseman 2007. Concerning contemporary ritual creativity, see also Houseman 2004 and 2012. 94. Eller 1993. 95. Houseman 2007. 96. Eller 1993. 97. Eller also speaks of solitary rituals (1993:106) that are “directed at sanctifying the self and embodying the goddess” when menstruating and describes one suggested by Felicity Artemis Flowers (1986:12). 98. Mariechild (1988:124–25, 173) as cited by Eller (1993:102, 247 n45). 99. Eller 1993:102. 100. Eller 1993:138. 101. Sarah Pike (2001) has pointed out that in Neopagan communities “participants are encouraged to share stories of abuse and victimization” (2001:210), and that in workshops during Neopagan festivals, safe places were created “to focus on healing emotional wounds through the body—usually troubled relationships and sexual abuse” (2001:196). 102. Stein (1987) and Budapest (1989). 103. Houseman 2007. 104. Fellous and Renard 1993; Fellous 2001:119–23. 105. Houseman 2007: 44. 106. Houseman 2007:44. 107. Salomonsen 2002:232–40. 108. Magliocco 2001:70. 109. Grimes 2006:135.

Chapter 6 1. I am grateful to Tanya Luhrmann for discussing these issues with me, Lisbon, September 2005. 2. Warner 1983:52. 3. Jansen 2000:240–44. 4. I cite here from the 2004 edition, p. XXIV, orig. 1998. 5. Roberts 1994. 6. “Rosa” refers here in Spanish to the rose, to Maria Rosa’s grandmother and to Maria Rosa’s own second name. 7. Uf, anda hija, ya estás arreglada no? 8. A regañadientes. 9. No servían para nada. 10. Muy encogida. 11. Hay que apechugar con esto. 12. Estar conectada con la Tierra; estar enraizada. 13. Shuttle and Redgrove 2005:56, orig. 1978. 14. Conectar con la Tierra. 15. Entregarse. 16. Douglas E. Harding, On Having No Head (1961). 17. Compare with Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996:166. 18. Comaroff 1985:9.

Chapter 7 1. On this occasion Dana and the other pilgrims spoke of ceremony, ritual, and rite of passage, using them as synonymous to refer to this event related to menopause. 2. Here Dana also observed that Lourdes was wearing a necklace with a pendant of the Egyptian goddess Isis with outspread wings and that Magdalene had a special link to Isis. 3. Dana’s version: “Ave Maria, full of grace, the Lord is with you, you are blessed among all women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God pray for

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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us your sons and daughters, now and in the hour of our victory over sin, illness and death. Amen.” Grimes 2000:307. Grimes 2000:4. See for instance Bell’s analysis of the gradual changes in Christian baptism and liturgy through the centuries (1997:212–23). Grimes 2000:6. Among others: Bell 1997:224–25; Houseman 2007, 2010. Bell 1997:241. Houseman 2007:31–48. Houseman 2007, 2010. Héritier 1996:228–32. I am grateful to Élisabeth Claverie for pointing this out. Houseman 2007. Houseman 2007:45. Salomonsen 2003:18. Fausto-Sterling 1999 orig. 1986. Fausto-Sterling 1999:176–77. Fausto-Sterling 1999:175. In her analysis of the neoshamanic ritual of soul retrieval Galina Lindquist observed a similar therapeutic process: “By going back into the past and revisiting the scenes of ordeals, the patients’ memories are given a new life. In a sense, the patients are given a new past, from which their new self and a new future can be imagined” (2004:164). See for instance Bell 1997:210–51; Grimes 2000; Fellous 2001; Dianteill et al. 2004. Salomonsen 2002:225–27. Salomonsen 2002:226. Salomonsen 2002:232–40. Salomonsen 2002:235. Salomonsen 2003. Roberts 1982. Marion Bowman looked at similarities and continuities between alternative spirituality, Christianity and vernacular religion in Glastonbury (2000: 83–104). Salomonsen 2003:18. See also Trulsson 2010: 306–09. Houseman 2010:65, my translation. Houseman 2010:65, my translation. Asad 1993:55–79. Grimes 2000:5–6. Grimes 2000:5–6. Salomonsen 2002:225–27. For the Findhorn community see Sutcliffe 2000. Grimes 2000:5. This poem is reprinted with the permission of the author, Margot Henderson. Weibel describes American women on a Black Madonna tour. They participated in the procession for Saint Sara in Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la Mer, visited her crypt and performed a ritual on the beach (2001:156–59). The author also refers to Ean Begg’s The Cult of the Black Virgin (1985) and to Starbird’s theory (1993) about the Black Madonnas being Mary Magdalene (2001:167–71). See also Weibel 2002a, 2002b, 2005. On dark Madonna statues see also Chiavola Birnbaum 1993. The cathedral has a long history of being the subject of esoteric research and is one of France’s best-known centers for ley line hunters, contemporary Templars and labyrinth walkers. Chartres, and its non-Christian pilgrims, would be an ideal subject for an anthropological study. It suffices here to observe that for the Italian group, the cathedral represented a place of union not only between masculine and feminine forces but also between different traditions. Here, as in other important Catholic pilgrimage sites they visited, Celso’s pilgrims shared Louis Charpentier’s esoteric ideas in The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral (1966).

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41. On the Black Madonna of Rocamadour see Weibel 2001, 2005. 42. For a detailed description of the pilgrims’ experiences in Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer see chapter eight of my dissertation (2008). 43. For a historical overview of the pilgrimage tradition see Bordigoni 2002 and 2005. The two Marys are Mary Jacobé, popularly considered to be the mother of James the Elder, and Mary Salomé, believed to be the sister or the cousin of the Virgin Mary. As for Sara, there are two main versions of her role during the arrival of the boat from Palestine bearing the three Marys (Magdalene, Jacobé, and Salomé) along with Martha, Lazarus, Maximin, and other Christians. According to the Roma I spoke to, Sara was a local Roma princess who foresaw the arrival of the boat in a dream and welcomed, or possibly rescued, the Christians on their arrival. In the version of the local priests, Sara was a servant of the Marys who heroically joined the saints on their journey to France. The Roma call her Sara the Kali, which means both “black” and “gypsy” but has led many pilgrims to establish a connection with the Indian goddess Kali. The pilgrimage attracts many people interested in feminist spirituality, and figures in several guidebooks to internationally important power places (see Badone 2008 and Weibel 2001:66, 156–59). 44. For a detailed analysis of the pilgrims’ ideas about and their experiences of Black Madonnas, see my chapter “’Black’ Madonna Versus ‘White’ Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines” (forthcoming). 45. In her article “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries” (2002), Monique Scheer offers a detailed overview of earlier studies about Black Madonnas and argues that they focused primarily on the color’s origin, i.e., debating “whether the color came about intentionally or not, oscillating between extremes of exoticization and denial” (2002:1419). She points out that the historical moment in which an image was created does not necessarily coincide with the moment it became black and notes an “apparent lack of interest in the color of the images” (2002:1422) until the seventeenth century. For Scheer this does not necessarily imply that the statues later identified as black were not dark before then, but that “regardless of the actual color of the image, the concept of a black madonna had not yet been fully developed as an accolade heightening an image’s prestige” (2002:1427). See also Christian 1995. 46. Luhrmann 2001. 47. Luhrmann 2001:114–15. 48. Luhrmann 2001:121–23. 49. Luhrmann 2001:134–35. 50. Luhrmann 2001:131–34. 51. Luhrmann 2001:130–31. 52. Luhrmann 2001:131–32.

Chapter 8 1. Haskins 1996:123–28, orig. 1993. 2. For a more detailed analysis of the invention and controversy related to Mary Magdalene’s relics see Jansen 2000:327–32 and Saxer 1975, 1977. 3. On irony in pilgrimages see Coleman 2010: 29–30 and Coleman and Elsner 1998. 4. Frey refers to objects brought home by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela as memory aids 1998:201–04. 5. Compare Nuñez del Prado 1998:162. 6. Eade and Sallnow 1991. 7. Among others: Morinis 1992; Coleman and Elsner 1995; Tweed 1997; Swatos and Tomasi 2002; Coleman and Eade 2004; Reader 2005; Margry 2008; Jansen and Notermans 2012. 8. Eade and Sallnow 1991:10. 9. Eade and Sallnow 1991:5, emphasis of the authors. 10. Eliade 1959, 1964; Turner 1968; Turner and Turner 1978. 11. Eliade 1963.

Note s to Pag e s 2 4 8 – 2 65 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

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Eade and Sallnow 1991:6–9. Weibel 2005. Eliade 1959. Eade and Sallnow 1991:9. Hermkens et al. 2009:7. Eade and Sallnow 1991:5. Hermkens et al. speak of a “gender bias in pilgrimage” (2009:5) and refer to Philip Taylor (2004). See also Jansen and Notermans 2012. Preston 1992. Ivakhiv 2001; Weibel 2001. Eade and Sallnow 1991. Morinis 1992:8–9. Morinis 1992:12. Eade and Sallnow 1991:9. Frey 1998:17–19; 72–81. Frey 1998:177–98. Weibel 2001; Ivakhiv 2001. Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman have explored the intersections between tourism and pilgrimage in an edited volume (2004). See also Cohen 1974, 1992. E.g., Reader and Walter 1993; Badone and Roseman 2004. Turnbull 1992:259. E.g., Badone and Roseman 2004; Crain 1996; Coleman and Elsner 1998; Coleman 2010; Frey 1998, 2004. E.g., Graburn 1977, 1983, 2004; MacCannell 1976; Picard 2011. Frey 1998, 2004. Badone 2004:185. Badone 2004:185. E.g., Carrette and King 2005. For other examples about the intersections of body and soul in contemporary spiritualities see Roussou (pp. 133–50) and Ostenfeld-Rosenthal (pp. 151–67) in Fedele and Blanes 2011. Frey 1998:177:216, 2004. See for instance Jodorowski 1995. Biodanza is a therapeutic system created in the 1960s by Rolando Toro Araneda that uses movement, dance, and contact among participants to foster their well-being and their presence in the here and now. In my MA thesis (2004, 2008), I indicated that Glastonbury ideally represented the final point of the route of Mary Magdalene. Dana’s choice of this place for the pilgrimage of the blood of 2006 confirmed the importance of this major British spirituality site for Magdalene pilgrims. For more details on Neopagans and the New Age movement in Glastonbury see Bowman 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 2000; Prince and Riches 2000; Ivakhiv 2001; Trulsson 2010. See http://www.goddessconference.com. Consulted September 29, 2009. See also Trulsson 2010:140–210. Dubisch and Winkelman 2005:XXII.

Conclusion 1. Brown 2003. 2. From a research paper about “American Piety in the 21st Century” of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion it emerges that “as church attendance increases the likelihood of having read The Da Vinci Code decreases” and that “Da Vinci Code readers express significantly greater belief in paranormal phenomena than non-readers” (Bader et al. 2006:22–23). I am grateful to William Christian for providing access to this document. 3. See, for instance, Kathleen Mc Gowan 2006; Bourgeault 2010.

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4. Pike 2001; Wallis 2003. 5. For a detailed account on criticism of the neoshamans’ appropriation and manipulation of native terms, rituals and theories see Pike 2001:138–54. 6. Claverie 2003:25–26. 7. Magliocco 2001:10. 8. Magliocco 2001:70. 9. Bynum 1987. 10. Bynum 1991:133. 11. Bynum 1991:135. 12. Among others: Badone 1990; Christian 1992, 1996; Claverie 1990, 2003; Mc Guire 2005; Orsi 1985, 1996. 13. C.f. Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln 1996:21–22, orig. 1982. 14. Washington 1993; Albanese 2006. 15. Said 1979. 16. Grimes 2000:4. 17. Bell 1997:223. 18. Grimes 2010:87, orig. 1990. 19. See Bell 1992, 1997:222–52; Asad 1993. Referring to ritual invention Bell mentions for instance the Freemason rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth century (1997:225) or more recently substitutive marriage rituals in the Soviet Union (1997:225–29). 20. Comaroff 1985:9. 21. Bell 1997:238. 22. Fedele 2009; Fedele and Llera Blanes 2011. 23. Asad 1993:167. 24. Among others: Mc Guire 2008; Albanese 1991. 25. Among others: Bynum 1987, 1991; Jansen 2000; Brown 1981; Cannell 2006. 26. Among others: Christian 1996; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Claverie 2003; Dubisch 1995; Hermkens et al. 2009; Egan 2011, Jansen and Notermans 2012. 27. Bell 1997:241. 28. Among others: Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Bell 1992; Coleman 2009. 29. Grosz 1991. 30. Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996:19. 31. Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996:95 32. Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996:165. 33. Lybrel (also called Anya), produced by Wyeth pharmaceutics and available by prescription, is a low-dose combination contraceptive pill taken 365 days a year, without a placebo phase or pill-free interval. According to Wyeth’s press release on the web page cited below, Lybrel is “intended for women who are seeking contraception and who are interested in putting their menstrual cycle on hold.” See http://www.wyeth.com/news?nav=display&; navTo=/wyeth_html/home/news/pressreleases/2007/1179876879334.html. Consulted on August 25, 2007. 34. Ginsburg 1989; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995. 35. See, for instance, the commentaries on the New York Times blog spot at http://business. blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/contraceptive-pill-under-fire/. Consulted on July 30, 2007. 36. Buckley and Gottlieb 1988. 37. Harrell 1981. 38. Harrell 1981; Buckley and Gottlieb 1988. 39. Chesler 2006; Saul 2007. Recent documentary films on the importance of menstruation are Cantow 2008 and Fabiánová 2010. 40. For a detailed analysis of the genealogy of the modern period in the United States see Freidenfelds 2009; for details about the development and marketing of Seasonale, the pill designed to suspend the menstrual flow during several months and introduced in 2003, see pp. 197–99. 41. Among others: Butler 1990, 2004; Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990.

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Washington, Peter. 1993. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. London: Martin Secker and Warburg. Watkins, Alfred. 1984 [1925]. The Old Straight Track. London: Sphere Books. Weibel, Deana. 2001. “Kidnapping the Virgin: The Reinterpretation of a Roman Catholic Shrine by Religious Creatives.” Unpublished PhD thesis. San Diego: University of California, San Diego. ———. 2002a. “The New Age and the Old World: the Interpretation and Use of European Shrines by ‘Religious Creatives.’” Maria 2 (2): 80–87. ———. 2002b. “‘The Energy We Call the Goddess’: the Religious Creativist Use of a Roman Catholic Shrine.’” Maria 2 (2): 88–94. ———. 2005. “Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Creativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, J. Dubisch and M. Winkelman, eds., 111–34. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Williamson, Tom and L. Bellamy. 1983. Ley Lines in Question. Kingswood, Surrey: World’s Work. Winafred Blake, Lucas. 1993. Regression Therapy: a Handbook for Professionals. 2 Vols. Crest Park, CA: Deep Forest Press. Wood, Matthew. 2007. Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2010. “W(h)ither New Age Studies? The Uses of Ethnography in a Contested Field of Scholarship.” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1 (1): 76–88. Woolger, Jennifer Barker, and Woolger, Roger J. 1994 [1990]. The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Woolger, Roger J. 1983. “The Holy Grail: Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western Psyche.” Pilgrimage 11 (2). ———. 1999 [1987]. Other Lives, Other Selves. A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives. London: HarperCollins. ———. 2005. “The Return of the Magdalene.” Caduceus March/April. Available at http://www. magdalenetours.com/magda%20article/MagdaleneCadueusFinal.pdf. York, Michael. 1995. The Emerging Network: a Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Zimmer Bradley, Marion. 1997 [1982]. Le nebbie di Avalon. Milano: Longanesi. Zwissler, Laurel. 2007. “Spiritual, But Religious; ‘Spirituality’ Among Religiously Motivated Feminist Activists.” Culture and Religion 8 (1): 51–69.

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Map 1. Celso’s itinerary: La Sainte-Baume, Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, Les-SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer, Carcassonne, Rennes-le-Château, Montségur, Montsaunès, Gouffre de Padirac, Rocamadour, Chartres, Vézelay.

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Map 2. Dana’s itinerary: Besalú (Catalonia, Spain), Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Marseille, La Sainte-Baume, Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, Maià de Montcal (Catalonia, Spain).

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Map 3. Roger’s itinerary: Marseille, La Sainte-Baume, Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Arles, Saint-Remy-en-Provence, Fontaine de Vaucluse, Orange, Les Gorges de l’Ardèche, Le-Puy-en-Velay, Saugues, Saint-Julien-de-Chazes, Brioude, Issoire, Orcival, Besse-en-Chandesse, Clermont-Ferrand, Marsat, Marthuret, Mozac, Lyon, Tournus, Autun, Bourges, Vézelay.

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INDEX

of Mary Magdalene, 9, 111, 113 menstrual blood and, 182, 186–87, 193 pilgrims’ attitudes toward, 24, 59, 61, 85–88, 115, 133, 149, 266, 273–275 sacralization of, 28, 67, 151–55, 168–69, 180–81, 220–29. See also Sexuality, Menstruation, Menopause Boltanski, Luc, 21, 281nn107–108 Books: pilgrims and the importance of, 25, 146, 269, 282–83n22, 289n4. See also Spiritual-esoteric literature Breasts, 182, 197 Brenda, 235, 251 Buckley, Thomas, 150–51, 183–84 Budapest, Zsuzsanna, 68, 149, 188, 282n15, 289n18 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 268–69

Abortion, 6, 193–94, 202–3, 239–40, 277 Adultery, 195–96, 198 Altar, 161, 177–80, 219, 258–59, 268–69 Ancestors, 10, 78, 82, 199, 259–60 Andean tradition, 35–36, 79–82, 84–88, 247, 285n45 Anthropology, 6, 20–21, 25–26 as used by the pilgrims, 44, 80, 150–51, 240, 248, 278n29 Archetypes, 69–74, 112–13, 130–33, 285n36, 287n26 Asad, Talal, 6, 18–21, 89, 232, 272 Augusto, 63, 87–88 Authority, 17, 34, 102, 157–58, 266, 273 Attunement, 6, 55–58, 60, 67, 168 Badone, Ellen, 253, 279n51, 295n27 Bambi, Celso, 34–36, 76–77, 79–80, 123–24, 255 Beauty, 38, 100, 113, 151, 179 as dangerous 33 of Mary Magdalene 116 as a substitute word for magic, 167, 174 Begg, Ean, 126–27, 238 Bell, Catherine, 19–21, 168, 271–72, 290n52, 296n19 Bender, Courtney, 17, 23, 144, 279n62, 281n109 Black Madonnas, 43, 123, 126, 237, 293n38 books and theories about, 43, 294n45 and darkness 148, 237–41, 294n44 Body, the: assumptions about the healing of the individual and social, 186, 197, 202–215 and assumptions about Native Americans, 76, 81 criticism of Christian theories about, 14, 70, 76, 108, 113–15, 119, 145, 151–54, 253–254

Cameron, Anne, 149–50, 151 Carmen, 259–60 Castaneda, Carlos, 23, 35, 80–81, 270, 286n56 Cathars, 15, 18, 34, 63, 136 Catholic religion: Franco regime in Catalonia and its relationship to, 48 and Mary Magdalene, 8–9, 109–111 pilgrims’ criticism of, 4, 70–76, 105–9, 114–121 as reinterpreted by the pilgrims, 16, 61, 88–105, 250 and pilgrim life stories, 3–4, 26, 32–44, 48–50, 123–144 vernacular, 7. See also Christianity, Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene Channeling, 131, 227, 282n6, 283n4 Chartres, 9–10, 12–13, 117, 126, 136–37, 140–41, 238, 293n40 Christian, William A. Jr., 277n12, 280n87, 285n37, 294n45, 296nn12, 26

315

316

Inde x

Christianity: attraction and repulsion toward, 47, 123, 181–82, 265–266 criticism of its appropriation of power places, 83, 126 hidden part of, 16–17, 43, 47, 76, 238 negative experiences related to, 49, 70–71, 123–44, 239–240 as opposed to spirituality, 18, 89 and persecution of pagans, 16, 66, 280n72 pilgrim criticism and reversal of, 18, 67, 72, 81, 125, 145–47, 253, 288n34 as presented by Latin American spiritual leaders, 117–118 vernacular, 269, 272–73, 293n27. See also Catholic religion Church, See Catholic religion, Christianity Clara, 77–79, 80, 115–17 Claverie, Élisabeth, 7, 21, 267 Coleman, Simon, 160, 248, 290n42, 294n3 Comaroff, Jean, 146, 181 Communitas, 19, 248 Community, 20, 153, 168, 176, 271 Conchero movement, 39, 77–79, 80–82, 98 Contraceptive pill, 185–86, 274, 296nn33, 35 Conversion, 31 Crone, 112, 214, 217, 220–32, 267 Da Vinci Code, 4, 25, 70, 73, 265, 295n2 influential for the pilgrims, 34, 42, 195 Dakini, 154–57, 286n50, 289n34, 290n35–36 Damsel, 218–26, 228 Dana, 15, 38–42, 46, 72, 77–80, 218, 256–57, 282n13 Darkness, 14, 76, 215, 217–241 negated by Christianity, 76, 288n34 and Mary Magdalene 118, 140 and Mother Earth, 43, 115, 237–41 De Sède, Gérard, 8–9 Decision-making, 50–55 Divinities, 36, 76, 157, 181, 220, 245, 249 new pantheon of, 266–267 and archetypes, 69–74 and darkness, 237–41. See also Goddess, Virgin, Black Madonna, Mary Magdalene DNA , 162–63, 166 Don Benito, 77, 79–80, 270, 285n45, 286n53 Doubt: resolving, 173–76 Dragonfly, 220–23, 227, 235, 258 Ecology: 10, 16, 81, 88, 267 spiritual basis, 12, 15, 38, 137–39, 207, 269–70, 282n14 Ego, 56, 283n26 Eliade, Mircea, 6, 20, 248–49

Elisabeth, 137, 139–44, 198, 244–45, 261. See also Leonard Eller, Cynthia, 66–68, 151, 187–88, 278n34, 283n5, 284n9, 292n97 Empowerment, 19, 87–88, 91 female, 4, 7, 66–71, 115, 149 Encarnación, 32–34, 118, 202–3, 260 on the sacrality of sexuality 54, 198 Energy: discourse, 18, 67, 88–92, 265, 267, 272 techniques, 79, 85–88 worldview in terms of, 12, 14, 28, 57, 59–61, 287nn5–6 Estrella, 48–49, 101, 225, 259, 288n n28–30 criticism of the Church, 114–18, 268 and menstrual offering to the Earth, 177–83, 210–11, 290n57 Eucharist, 21, 160–161, 179–82, 268–69, 272 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 229, 289n16, 293nn17–18 Felicia, 129–31, 167–68, 174, 223, 258 on the Franco regime, 48 on pilgrimage, 250, 251 Feminine, the, 83–84, 132–33, 203 lost connection with, 18, 63–66, 189, 204–205 Mary Magdalene as model of, 70–71, 118–19, 193 Neoshamanism and return of, 80, 285–86nn50, 51 quest for 26, 63–66, 69 as opposed to the masculine, 100, 118–19, 203–6, 262–263 and darkness, 137–41, 217, 237–241 and grounding, 211–215 revolution, 115 Sacred, 4, 13, 28, 36, 51 side, 41, 63–66, 283n3, 189 wounds related to, 191–215 Feminism, 5, 15, 81 critical attitudes toward, 66, 115, 151–52, 273, 289n33 Festivities, 38, 67 Fiel, Emilio, 39, 77–80, 250, 285n45, 286n51 Fieldwork, 22–27, 30, 166, 266, 270 Frey, Nancy, 250–51, 253, 254, 279n46, 294n4 Gaia, 12. See also Mother Earth Gaian pilgrims, 12–13 Gardner, Gerald, 10–11, 278n36

Inde x Gender, 7, 17, 18, 34, 66, 168, 197 reproduction of conventional assumptions about, 100, 249 roles, 21, 69, 263, 266, 272 and social critique, 67, 115, 189, 192, 197, 229, 267, 273–75. See also: Women, Feminine Geomancy, 13, 14 Gianmichele, 37, 53, 63, 137–41, 207, 255–256 about the Feminine, 65–66. See also Luciana Glastonbury, 12, 257, 278n31, 295n40 Gnostics, 64, 112, 157–58 Goddess, 10–11, 14–17 psychology, 69–71 pilgrims, 12–14. See also: Neopaganism, Feminine, Mother Earth, Divinities Goddess Wood, 22, 38–42, 45–46, 52–53, 67, 98 and its changes after the pilgrimage, 257 and feminist spirituality groups, 82, 97, 136, 180–81. See also Menstrual rituals Gothic cathedrals, 13, 34, 45 Gottlieb, Alma, 183–84 Grimes, Ronald, 20, 25, 224, 232 Grounding, 206–15 Healing , 7, 12, 105 as central to rituals, 19, 85, 95, 186, 189 Mary Magdalene as key figure for, 144 and menstruation, 146–189 of sexual wounds, 191–215 of the social body, 168, 186, 189 taking place in unexpected places, 249, 262. See also Wise wound, Wounded healer Heelas, Paul, 17, 34, 56, 280n80, 283n26 Héritier, Françoise, 180, 227 Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The 238. See also Sangraal theories Hormone therapy, 18, 218, 228, 233–34 Houseman, Michael, 25, 187–88, 224–27, 232, 292n93 Humor, 15, 108–9, 245, 287n22 Immacolata, 49–50, 57, 206, 256 on grounding, 63, 208 Immanence, 88, 111, 290n55 Independent pilgrims, 32–34, 106, 118 Judeo-Christian heritage, 159, 253 and patriarchy, 14, 70, 75, 88 Jungian psychology, 25, 69, 73–74, 84, 146 in Celso’s approach to pilgrimage, 84, 283n3

317

and Black Madonnas, 126, 148, 238 and Goddess psychology, 69–71 and Mary Magdalene, 183, 290n39 and the pilgrimage leaders’ life stories, 35, 42–44, 87, 124 and archetypes, 74, 284n26, 288n1. See also Archetype Katrina, 107–9, 142, 243, 261, 262 Khuyas, 90, 247 Knights Templar, 5, 15, 68, 112, 158 and Gothic cathedrals, 13, 293n40 and past lives, 63–64, 136 Layard, John, 44, 146–47 Le Puy-en-Velay, 126–27, 238, 244–45 Leonard, 107, 118–19, 139–44, 212, 261 on darkness, 241. See also Elisabeth, Liberal Catholic Church Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 9, 29–30, 32 figure 1.3 and Sara 238, 294n42. See also Saint Sara Ley lines, 12, 16, 279n51. See also Telluric forces, Sacred geography Liberal Catholic Church, 44, 139–41, 241 Life passages, 6, 232 Life stories, 21, 24, 48, 144, 275 Liminality, 184, 248 Limpia, 84–85, 101 Lindquist, Galina, 11, 85, 278–79n38, 293n19 Luciana, 37, 64, 133–37, 200–201, 262, 288nn13–14. See also Gianmichele Luhrmann, Tanya M., 26, 238–41, 278n37, 287n9, 288n34 Lynn, 199–201, 213, 245, 246–47. See also William Magliocco, Sabina, 10, 268 Maià de Montcal, 217, 312 map 2 Maps, 311–13 Marginality: embracing of, 97 healing feelings of, 49, 263 Margot, 3–4, 49, 75, 198, 245–46, 261 on the cave of the Sainte-Baume, 107–109 on menopause, 232–237 poems by, 119, 236–37 Marihuana, 218–20 Maria Antònia, 29, 50–52, 55–59, 65 on the rituals at La Sainte-Baume, 103–5, 119–20, 165–67, 169, 171–74, 188 on the ritual of the last blood, 224, 226 on the wounds healed during the pilgrimage, 203–206, 213, 225, 228, 258–59, 262

318

Inde x

Maria Rosa, 33–34, 118, 261 on wounds of sexuality, 194–97, 198, 202 Martin, Emily, 186, 287n16, 291nn89–91 Mary Magdalene: archetype, 71–74, 130–133 and Eve, 113 in Glastonbury, 278n31 in the gospels, 7–8, 277–78nn17–19 link between Christianity and feminist spirituality, 108, 181 presence at the Sainte-Baume, 105–121 and menstruation, 147, 155–57, 160, 183 relics, 30, 97, 116, 118, 243, 294n2 repentant sinner, 8, 106, 108–9, 111 in the spiritual esoteric literature, 8–9, 265, 267, 278n29 wounded healer, 144, 191–215, 266–67, 268 Matriarchy, 10–11, 67, 181, 280n71 the myth of prehistorical, 68, 278n34 and the sacralization of menstrual blood, 145, 150 Masculine, the, 47, 63–66, 68–70, 84, 100 figures, 284n24 and Jesus, 125 and the Feminine, 203, 262, 283n3 and Mary Magdalene, 118 and the Santiago pilgrimage, 250 world, 203–206, 258. See also Feminine Menarche, 151, 185–87, 189, 230–32, 273–74 Menopause, 149, 161, 163, 217–232, 232–37. See also Hormone therapy, Dragonfly Menstruation: sacralization and ritualization of, 145–89, 217–37, 290n56 and Christ’s blood, 182–183 and death, 183–186 pill that eliminates, 274–75, 296n39–40 Mesa, 84–85, 90 in the Conchero movement, 78, 286n51 Methodology, 22–27 Meurois-Givaudan, Anne and Daniel, 95, 287nn13, 22 Miscarriage, 153–54, 193, 194, 195–96, 202–3 Morality, 142–44 Mother, 3, 34, 92, 130 archetype of, 71–73, 130 Magdalene as, 112–13 single, 43, 125, 142–44 Mother Earth, 10, 11, 16, 266–67, 269, 279n54 destructive side of 162–63, 238–239 offering of menstrual blood to, 161–73, 177–81, 290n56 and Black Madonnas, 238–241 and grounding, 206–11. See also Ecology, Gaia, Grounding Murray, Margaret, 6, 10

Name, importance of using complete first, 281n5 Nanita, 77–82 Native Americans, and offering of menstrual blood to the Earth, 108, 145, 150, 155, 184 and Pan-Indianity, 11, 150 transcultural borrowing from, 76–82, 266, 286n57, 62 Neo-Indians, 81–82, 279n43, 286n55 Neopaganism, 4, 5–6, 10–11, 26, 277nn5, 8, 278n37, 284nn12–13 Neoshamanism, 4, 11, 36, 76–82, 278n38, 293n19 and use of anthropological theories, 266, 270–71. See also Neo-Indians, Native Americans New Age, 4, 56, 71–71, 168, 277n2, 280n80 distancing from, 14–15, 81–82, 112–13, 253, 279nn62, 64 Nudity, 153, 155, 221 Nuns, 133–37 Nuñez del Prado, Juan, 11, 35–36, 77–82, 125, 270 and the Q’ero community, 286n52 and sexual equality, 285–86n50 and the use of Quechua terms, 286n53 Objects, 245–48 Owen, Lara, 150–57 Paola, 37, 63, 256 Past lives, 131–44 Patriarchy, 16, 38, 80, 151, 265–66 Penance, 20, 28, 88–89, 96 Persephone, 70, 239, 240 Pilgrimage, 4, 5–7, 271, 272–273 changing forms of, 12–17, 248–49, 279nn46–47 as a lifelong journey, 251, 263 as opposed to tourism, 252–254 reinterpretation of Catholic, 88–96 Plantard, Pierre, 8–9, 278n25 Poems, 236–37 Power places, see Sacred geography Pragmatic sociology, 21, 281n107 Pre-Christian religions, 10, 13, 15, 76. See also Matriarchy Priory of Sion, 9, 278n24 Prostitute: Magdalene as sinful, 8, 115, 147, 191 Magdalene as sacred, 112, 146, 285n44. See also Sacred sexuality Purificación, 77, 97–98, 115, 161–62, 164

Inde x Qualls-Corbett, Nancy, 146, 183, 291n69 Reincarnation, 131–133. See also Past lives Reproduction: as separated from sexuality, 275 as inherent to ritual processes, 181, 249 Reproductive organs, 150, 222, 230, 288n28 surgery on, 194, 202–3 Return home, 254–63 Ritual objects, 78, 169–73, 245–48. See also Altar, Khuya, Mesa Ritual, 5–7 creativity, 19–21, 187–89, 224–229 genealogy of, 229–232 lived, 166–168 narratives, 24–25, 275 right to, 271–272 self-conscious aspects of crafted, 20–21, 224, 271, 273 Rosary, 41, 98, 101, 256 and the ritual of the last blood, 222–23, 222 figure 7.1, 227 adapted prayer related to the, 292n3 Sacred geography, 12–13, 83, 127–28. See also Power places, Telluric forces Sainte-Baume, La, 30 figure 1.1, 83–121, 93 figure 3.1, 99 figure 3.3, 102 figure 3.4, 106 figure 3.5, 114 figure 3.6 Catholic pilgrimages to the, 74 Saint-Maximin-en-Provence, 9, 29–30, 31 figure 1.2, 243 procession of Mary Magdalene’s relics in, 116, 118, 119 Saint-Pilon, 95–97, 96 figure 3.2 Sali, 53, 176, 201, 205–6, 259 Salomonsen, Jone, 185, 189, 229–32 Sangraal theories, 9, 30, 68, 73–74, 278nn25, 29. See also Da Vinci Code Sara, Saint, 9, 30, 48, 259, 294n43 and darkness, 238. See also Les SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer Sathya, 60, 90 Self, 56, 187–88, 227, 273–74, 280n80 as important concept for the pilgrims’ spirituality, 17–18, 34, 67, 120, 186 and its importance in ritual, 20, 21, 168, 189, 224 ritual and pilgrimage and mirroring of, 225–28, 251 Sexuality, 3, 24, 34, 57, 67, 235, 266 and abuse, 20 Christianity’s rules about, 49, 70, 71–76, 115, 239, 253

319

and darkness, 241 feelings of shame and guilt related to, 33, 54 and femininity, 135–136 and menstruation, 156–57, 159, 179 priestesses and, 136 and Mary Magdalene, 4, 5, 8, 71–76, 110–14, 156 sacred, 5, 54, 136, 156 and spirituality, 120, 181, 258, 260, 266 wounds related to, 132–33, 143, 191–215, 260, 267 Shinoda Bolen, Jean, 55, 69, 284n24. See also Goddess psychology Shrine: as signpost, 125–128 as power places appropriated by the Church, 114–121 of Rocamadour, 238, 250, 294n41 Sin, 54, 137, 143–44, 182, 198 and Mary Magdalene, 8, 72–73, 106, 108–11, 192–93, 195 and Eve, 113, 145 and the Virgin, 73 techniques to release, 88–92, 164 Spirits, 172, 183, 247 evil, 84, 177 of the four elements, 103 of nature, 16, 28, 49, 67, 84–85, 100–101, 104 of Native-American women, 155 of the seven directions, 177, 179, 290n57 Spiritual-esoteric literature, 25, 47, 159, 269–70, 278n29 and Mary Magdalene, 9, 36, 43, 72, 112, 284–85n29 Spirituality, 5–7, 17–18, 21, 24, 120 feminist, 67–71 Starhawk, 230, 283n5 Stein, Diane, 68, 149, 151, 188, 282n15, 289n18 Susanna, 37, 53, 63, 252, 255–256 and the offering of menstrual blood, 92–93, 157–59, 168, 210 Tantra, 35, 39, 290n35 Telluric forces, 13, 90–91, 185, 279n51 Thévenot, Laurent, 281nn107–108 Tourist: distinction between pilgrim and, 13–14, 31, 87, 249, 252–54, 275 attractions, 120, 128 Travel arrangements, 34–47 Turner, Victor, 6, 19–20, 55, 230, 248, 271 Van Gennep, Arnold, 6, 19, 20, 55, 230, 248, 271 Vézelay, 36, 42, 243, 247

320

Inde x

Virgin Mary, 69, 220 and Christian rules about sexuality, 71–76 and menopause, 227. See also Black Madonnas, Shrines Virginity, 74, 187–88 Warner, Marina, 71–76, 106, 192–193, 280n71 William, 65, 198, 211–15, 246–47, 262. See also Lynn Witches, 10–11, 15, 67–68, 115, 135–37, 289n15 and menstruation, 148–149 and reframing of the term, 267 rituals that remind pilgrims of, 175–76, 288n14 Wise Wound, The, 145–49, 150, 192 Womb, 84, 169, 180–81, 185, 236, 288n28 and caves, 92, 94–95, 108, 143 health issues related to the, 157, 209

and Mary Magdalene, 115, 197 and the menstrual cycle, 150, 154, 160, 221 Women: devaluation and domination of, 16–17, 38, 48, 111, 144, 265, 269 empowerment of, 4, 7, 40–41, 54, 66–71, 120, 266, 275 in Pre-Christian and indigenous societies, 11, 13, 38, 80–81 and rejection of Christianity, 16, 49, 71–76, 108–9, 113, 115, 133–137 reproduction of negative stereotypes about, 99–100, 112, 148–49. See also Feminine, Feminism, Gender, Menstruation, Menopause Wood, Matthew, 279n64, 280n80 Woodhead, Linda, 17, 34, 284n9 Woolger, Roger, 42–44, 46–47, 62, 72 on Goddess psychology, 69–71 on Mary Magdalene, 191–92, 199 on past lives, 131–44 Wounded healer, 143, 192–94