The Gypsy goddess of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the ‘Saint Marys of the Sea’, used to be a small fishing village located on the French Mediterranean coast. Today, it is best known as the destination of thousands of “gypsies”, who annually come to the seaside resort to worship the statue of a Christian saint, Sara. But who is she?

Philip Coppens

Archaeological excavations and local legends indicate that the site of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer has been venerated as a holy place from prehistoric times; it retained its holiness with the Celts, Romans and Christians. In Celtic times, the town had a holy spring and was known as the Oppidum Priscum Ra. Worship to the triple water deity Matres co-existed with and was later superseded by Roman temples dedicated to Artemis, Cybele, Isis and Mithras. Of course, Christianity “adopted” these sacred sites and historical sources mention a church from the 9th century onwards, though the town only truly made a regular appearance in historical accounts from the 14th century onwards.
However, one local legend has grandiosely tried to fill the gap between 400 BC and 900 AD by stating that Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, Mary Jacob, Lazarus and several other disciples such as Maximus and Sidonius – many of them present at the Crucifixion of Christ – were forced, in 45 AD, to flee the Holy Land by boat. Mary Salome was the mother of James, son of Zebedee and Mary Jacob the sister or cousin of the Virgin Mary. Following a perilous journey, their boat – equipped without sail and therefore destined to perish at sea – miraculously crossed the Mediterranean Sea, coming ashore near Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where the passengers disembarked.
According to legend, Saint Martha went to Tarascon, where, by showing the sign of the cross, she appeased the monster Tarasque that used to rise out of the waters of the Rhone to devour children and livestock. Mary Magdalene headed for Sainte Baume, where she supposedly spent the remaining days of her life in a desolate cave, clothed only by her own, long hair. Lazarus went to Marseille and became its first bishop and Maximinus to Aix. In short, the Christianisation of France was said to have occurred by prominent witnesses of what Christianity saw as the greatest event of all times: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it is two women, Mary Salome and Mary Jacob, who remained in the area where the boat had come ashore and who became, in time, objects of veneration to the local people.

According to some sources, the village now known as Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was originally known as Ratis, which means “raft” in Latin, and later, the church itself, which is shaped like a boat, was for some time known as Notre Dame de Ratis (Our Lady of the Raft). It is a direct reference to the boat that brought these saints to France. Indeed, only in the 19th century did the town become officially known as Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, though locals had called it as such for several centuries.
Though seen as holy, it is only in recent centuries that the town has stood out, solely due to the devotion by the gypsies. And their devotion is not towards these two saints, but to a third: Sara(h). The question, however, is: who is she? She was after all apparently not one of the people on that boat.

A lot – and a lot of nonsense – has been written about the gypsies. As a minority group, they have often been avoided, scorned, chased away, persecuted, killed or spoken ill of. To a large extent, the gypsies are still seen as a mysterious people and it is probably true to say that they are special in Europe as they have largely held on to a nomadic lifestyle to this very day.
But it is their religion that some consider to be their biggest enigma. Some have claimed the gypsies never reveal a single detail about their belief. Some have claimed they worship Mary Magdalene and that it is this reason why they annually gather here. Both claims are, however, utter nonsense.
What is true, is that the gypsies come to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer once a year. At the core of the appeal of the town – and the destination of their pilgrimage – is a fortified Romanesque church, which dates from the 12th century. It is in its crypt that we find the actual centre of the gypsy devotion: a statue of Saint Sarah, known to the gypsies as Sara-la-Kali, whose origin and identity are for many people still a mystery. Several legends about who she is nevertheless do exist.
One legend claims that the gypsies believe that Sarah was a powerful local queen who welcomed the tired travellers from the Holy Land, while other sources suggest she may have been an ancient pagan goddess – a Black Madonna? – or a black Egyptian woman that was the servant of Christ’s mother Mary. Christians preferred to see her as an unexpected passenger on the boat. The adapted legend goes that while the Romans set the boat adrift in the Holy Island, Sarah apparently begged to be taken with them. A miracle enabled her to reach the boat by walking on the water, using Mary Salome’s cloak as a type of magical carpet by which she was able to reach the boat.

The so-called “Pelerinage des Gitans”, or the Pilgrimage of the Gypsies, occurs annually on May 24 and 25. The gypsies look upon the festival as a time of religious worship as well as a time to meet up with friends and relatives.
On the afternoon of May 24, the statues of the two Marys, stored in a wooden box, are lowered from their storage high in the upper Saint Michael’s church. As the relics are lowered, some hold up babies, as the belief goes that to touch the relics before they reach the ground is to receive a wondrous healing and protection from misfortune. After the statues of the two Marys have been revealed from their containers, the statue of Sarah is brought up from the crypt below. She is carried on the shoulders of four gypsies, on a procession to the nearby sandy beach. On the beach, the party – surrounded by hundreds of pilgrims – wade knee-deep into the water, to turn around and return the statue to the church, where the three saints are venerated for the remainder of the day.
The following morning, the statues of the two Marys are placed in a bark and are, on their turn, taken to the sea, returned and worshipped. At first sight, the procession seems to be a theatrical rendition of the legend of how the saints’ bark came ashore here; but why are the three saints not taken to the sea together, on the same day?
What is less known, is that the festival actually has a slightly less popular third day, when there is the “abrivado”, in memory of the Marquis de Baroncelli, who helped the local people. Folco de Baroncelli was born in Aix in 1869, of an aristocratic Florentine family, and soon developed a love of bulls. He settled in the Camargue in 1895, founding the Manando Santenco near Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. He codified the activities of the gypsies and promoted minority rights. He was the one who won the right for the gypsies to honour Sarah publicly. In his honour, bulls are driven through the streets, while the crowd tries to let the bulls escape from their predetermined course. Even less known is that there is a second pilgrimage on the weekend closest to October 22, when the reliquaries of the two Marys are once again taken down and are taken down to the sea. For this festival, Sarah remains inside her crypt.

So what is it that attracted the gypsies here? What is so special about Sarah that thousands of gypsies, from all over Europe, come to this area?
First of all, it is not known when and why the local church became so sacred to the gypsies, but what is know, is that it was some time after the gypsies’ arrival in Europe in the early 1400s. Likely, the devotion occurred after René d’Anjou gave the order to excavate an oratory – where the two Marys were allegedly buried – in December 1448. The crypt – in which Saint Sarah stands – dates from the time of these excavations. The excavations indeed revealed several human heads arranged in the form of a cross and the bodies of two women. An altar of compacted earth was also found, as well as a smooth marble stone that was later to be called “the Saints’ pillow”, currently visible inside the church.
The discovery was the proof required to claim that the two bodies were the two Marys, and King René put Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the pilgrim map. At a ceremony in the presence of King René and Queen Isabelle, the relics were piously placed in the two reliquaries and stored in the upper chapel above the main altar. Though the reliquaries themselves were destroyed at the time of the Revolution, the local priesthood had apparently the foresight to secure the relics inside, so that after the Revolution, merely two new reliquaries had to be made, and the bones reinserted in them. Though by 1797, everything was therefore ready, the procession through the streets only recommenced in 1862.
Though this explains the problem of the Marias, it is clear that there were no bones of Sarah – and it is her statue, not her relics, that is so paramount in the annual procession. Furthermore, the present statue is clearly of quite recent origin and would, in a line-up of Christian statues, not stand out. It is said that this statue is only the most recent in a series, but when the first was made, is again an unknown.

So why Sarah? For some, it is because she is “in truth” a Black Madonna and – so the thinking goes – the gypsies must be into the worship of the Black Madonna. Noting that some people argue that the Black Madonna was in truth Mary Magdalene, we understand how that theory came about.
After the publication of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, in which it is postulated that Jesus not only had descendents, but that they lived in France, their blood merging with the Merovingian dynasty, some authors, like Margaret Starbird and Tim Wallace-Murphy posited that Sarah was actually the daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus.
Others – less controversially – argue that in The Legend of the Saintes-Maries, written in 1521, Vincent Philippon writes that Sarah travelled through the Camargue to provide for the needs of a small Christian community. Thus, the practice of begging for alms performed by Sarah gave early writers a reason to make Sarah into a patron goddess of the gypsies – and hence why they would have such a devotion to her.
Alas, the truth is much more intriguing. Just like the Christians put a Christian veneer on pagan traditions, so the gypsies put a gypsy veneer on Christianity. “Sarah-la-Kali”, sometimes translated as Sarah the Black, was really a reference to the Hindu goddess Kali.

First of all, we should note that the origins of the gypsies are no longer a mystery. We know that they left India as a group of nomads around 900 AD, reached Persia in 950, and were in Egypt by 1230. By 1370 the gypsies, or Gitans, were in France and it is said that they were in the Camargue in 1438 – around the time of the excavations carried out by René d’Anjou.
India, of course, has a Hindu goddess known as Kali. Kali is represented as black – which would have greatly helped the confusion with identifying Sarah as a Black Madonna – which, to a large extent, Kali is indeed. In fact, like the Virgin Mary, she is also revered as Bhavatarini, literally “redeemer of the universe”, though in origin, she was a figure of annihilation, comparable to the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. But from her violent origins, Kali has now evolved into a type of benign Mother Goddess.
Could it be that her worship was simply pasted onto Sarah, to become “Sarah the Kali”? Ronald Lee has performed a lot of work on this subject and has come to the conclusion that this is indeed the likeliest conclusion – supported by testimony given by the gypsies themselves – who, if you ask, are actually not at all reluctant to speak about their religion.

First of all, Lee notes that contrary to what some claim, the worship of Sarah at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is not unique. Similar statues were worshipped by the gypsies in Eastern Europe. He states: “These rituals include laying flowers at the feet of the statue, adorning the statue with clothing of the sick hoping for cures, placing requests to the statue, and lighting candles to the female divinity. To the Roma [the gypsies], Kali Sara is the Protectress who will cure sickness, bring good luck and fertility and grant success in business ventures.” Lee added that all of these ceremonies included carrying a statue into the nearest body of water, whereby the bark was also lowered into the water – like at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Experts in Hindu mythology have confirmed that these Romani festivals are indeed identical to the ceremony of the Durga Pooja of India, where the statue of the Goddess is carried into a body of water too. The only difference is that the statue is immersed into it, the immersion destroying the statue itself. It is clear that this might have been one step too far for the Christian community who participate in the “Sarah festival”. Hence the rather odd tradition of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer of carrying a statue knee-deep in water, and just return – which to all involved seems to feel like there is something missing.

Durga Puja is the biggest festival of the Hindus in Bengal and is also known as Akalbodhan, Vijaya Dashami, Dashain, and Dussehra. There, the festival occurs in the autumn, from the sixth to tenth day of the waxing moon in the month of Ashwin, which is the sixth month in the Bengali calendar. However, the goddess was traditionally worshipped in the spring, but due to contingencies of battle, Rama had to invoke her in the autumn. Today, the festival is therefore held in the autumn, although the spring puja, known as Basanti Puja, is still present in the Hindu almanac. Like the festival of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, religion takes a backseat and it is largely a carnival, where people come together to enjoy themselves.
If there are still any doubters, the goddess Kali in Hindu is also known as Sara. Finally, Lee’s research in other countries, including interviews with the gypsies themselves, has confirmed that the gypsies were aware that “Sara-la-Kali” was in truth Kali. He noted that Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is not the only location where the gypsies have adopted a Christian saint: in Mexico, Mexican gypsies attend the festival of The Virgin of Guadalupe, which enables them to worship a female divinity sponsored by the Church – even though in truth she is another substitute for Kali. He concluded: “Roma all over the world continue to worship female deities or saints in shrines located near bodies of water, honouring them with ceremonies that come not from Christianity but from Hinduism.” But with greater religious liberty at the end of the 20th century, in 1998, the first Kali Sara festival was held in Vancouver and in 2001, a statue of her was created for her worship in Toronto.

The cult of Sarah is therefore not a remnant of some pagan or secret Christian tradition. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was seen by the gypsies as a safe-haven, a location where they could practice their home-grown festivals within the comfort of a newly invented myth, that of Sarah. That she is a very adaptable goddess is made evident in recent years, seeing how – in so many books, especially since and with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, she has been transformed into the daughter of Jesus. Sarah is therefore currently being hijacked by the New Age community, but perhaps the gypsies, seeing how they are externalising their worship of Kali, might soon reclaim it for the Hindu deity she always was.