Where, if, in your day, you were to visit the village called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, you would encounter the annual gathering of Gypsies who remember and honour … the coming of the Two Marys … and a veiled girl-child they call Sar’h.
Heartsong and Clemett, Anna, the Voice of the Magdalenes, 2010 (short excerpt for review and study)
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer sits on the Mediterranean in the Rhône delta and is the chief town of the Camargue, a country of marshes and lagoons where flamingos and egrets are protected and ranchers breed the local horses and bulls. Its name means “the Saint Marys of the Sea”. Each May it fills with Romani pilgrims who come to honour the Marys said to have landed there and their own saint, Sara.
In Anna, the Voice of the Magdalenes (2010), Claire Heartsong and Catherine Ann Clemett give these words to their narrator Anna. She tells a reader of the present day that the Gypsies who gather in the village each year still remember the coming of the Two Marys, and of more women besides, along with a veiled girl-child called Sar’h. See also Anna, Grandmother of Jesus, the Magdalenes and Mary of Bethany.
How the town got its name
The Roman geographer Rufus Festus Avienus recorded the place as Ra in the 4th century AD. In the 6th century the church of Arles founded a church there dedicated to St Mary, and the village became Notre-Dame-de-Ratis, Our Lady of the Boat, after the Marys who were said to have arrived by boat. It later became Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer, and in 1838 it took its present name. The fortified church that still stands by the shore was built between the 9th and 12th centuries as a refuge from raiders, with a well inside. In the 15th century relics said to belong to Mary of Clopas and Mary Salome were found there.
The legend of the boat
The medieval legend has the three women who found the empty tomb leave the Holy Land after the Crucifixion and cross the sea to Provence. The names vary. Some versions give Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Mary Salome, the three of Mark’s gospel. Others give Mary Magdalene, Mary of Clopas and Mary Salome. The company can grow to include Lazarus, later bishop of Aix-en-Provence, his sisters Mary and Martha, Maximin, and Joseph of Arimathea, with Sarah as the maid of one of the Marys. The persecution that sent them out to sea is usually placed in the year 42. The feast of the Three Marys was kept mostly in France and Italy, and the Carmelite Order took it into its liturgy in 1342.
The two Marys honoured in the town today are Marie Jacobé and Marie Salomé. Their feasts fall on 25 May and 22 October.
Sara the Black
Sara-la-Kâli, “Sara the Black”, is the patron saint of the Roma in folk Catholicism, though the Catholic Church has never recognised her as a saint. Her dark statue stands in the crypt of the church. One account makes her the Egyptian maid of the Marys, usually of Mary Jacobe. Another makes her a local woman who welcomed them when they came ashore. Franz de Ville, writing in 1956, gives a Romani version in which Sara was a chieftain on the Rhône who saw the saints coming in a vision and helped their boat to land.
The tradition of the Marys reaching France goes back to the High Middle Ages and appears in the 13th century Golden Legend. Sara herself first appears in Vincent Philippon’s The Legend of the Saintes-Maries of 1521, as a charitable woman who collected alms. Some writers link her to the Hindu goddess Kali. Ronald Lee argued in 2001 that worship of Kali and Durga had passed to her among Roma in France. The idea that Sara was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene comes from Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, and local people and scholars reject it.
The May pilgrimage
The Romani pilgrimage was first mentioned soon after the renaming of 1838. Each 24 May more than 10,000 travellers, among them Roma, Manouches, Gitans, Sinti and Yenish, come from across Europe to honour Sara and have their children baptised. Counts for the whole week run between 25,000 and 40,000.
On 24 May the reliquary of the Marys is lowered by winch from the upper chapel. Romani bearers then carry Sara’s statue to the sea, where it waits for the saints to arrive. This procession is recent. It dates from 24 May 1935, when the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli and his Camargue horsemen, the gardians, won the archbishop’s consent for it. On 25 May, after a solemn mass, a boat holding the statues of the two Marys is carried into the water among gardians on horseback and women in Arles costume. A bishop blesses the sea from a fishing boat. In the afternoon the reliquary is raised again. A smaller procession for the two Marys takes place on the Sunday nearest 22 October.
