When studying a group of African women in Paris making regular pilgrimages to European Marian sites, I was struck by the overpowering way these women built their lives as Marian devotees in the diaspora. The women appeared to be exceptionally well informed about the supply of European pilgrimages and developed such an intense programme of religious travel that their mobility became a kind of lifestyle that was vital in framing their new lives as migrant mothers (e.g. Notermans et al. 2013). Although raised as Catholics in their African homelands and very well acquainted with Mary and the related devotional rituals from childhood, they lacked any substantial experience in the field of Marian pilgrimage prior to their migration. It was only after their move to Europe that their religious behaviour began to change: the women intensified their religious activities, started to bond with Mary, and gradually trained themselves as experts in Marian pilgrimage. Central in their travelling was souvenir shopping: they collected souvenirs at the different shrines and turned these into powerful medicine, which they used as Mary’s mediating objects in their migrant communities. Building authority in this way, they changed their position as marginalized migrant mothers into a powerful position as professional transnational healers.
Although the meaning of Marian devotion for migrant communities has been amply documented (e.g. Orsi 1985; Tweed 1997; Skrbis 2007; Brown 2011; Eade and Krotofil 2012; Notermans 2012; Liebelt 2014) and an increase in post-migration religiosity has been recognized worldwide, little attention is paid to the ways religious practices from pre- and post-migration locations merge in migrants’ religious lives. Little attention is also paid to exactly how migrant women devote their post-migration life to Mary, build a professional track as Marian specialists and, while doing so, become key figures in (transnational) migrant communities. Studies on migrants’ Marian devotion tend to focus on the meaning of diasporic Marian shrines, the festivals celebrated there, and how the various rituals contribute to home- and community-building in the migrant country (e.g. Orsi 1985; Tweed 1997). Such studies tend to neglect alternative, less church-focused, multi-sited, and gendered religious practices like women’s souvenir shopping. This chapter investigates the shared experience of a multi-ethnic group of Catholic African migrant women in Paris. It focuses on how women build ‘spiritual capital’ (Verter 2003) by developing their skills and knowledge in the field of Marian devotion along various pilgrimage routes; and how, in this process, pre- and post-migration religiosity converge in women’s re-invented repertoire of ‘medicines’: the healing objects that transcend geographical borders and work on a transnational scale. These objects may be considered the expression of a fusion between various religious traditions. This fusion results in modern ways of Marian devotion, developed by African women during their pilgrimages, and ends up in a specific kind of empowerment characterized by a connection between the women’s social status in Europe as well as in Africa and the power they ascribe to Mary.
The chapter builds on longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among Catholic African women on the topics of religion, gender, and kinship (1991–2006), and about Marian devotion and European pilgrimage in France and Italy (2009–15).1 The fieldwork consisted of participant-observation in Paris, Lourdes, and San Damiano, combined with ‘small talk’ (Driessen and Jansen 2010), informal conversations, and interviews. The focus was on women as they were the main actors at the pilgrimage sites and were directing their families in Paris. An extensive case study was made of the 56-year-old Congolese woman Emmanuelle by paying various visits to her Parisian home and accompanying her on her travelling in and out of Paris. Her reconstructed life-history will be a main part of this chapter to illustrate how women’s pre-migration interpretations of Catholicism and witchcraft join post-migration Marian devotion in a skilful practice, which I would like to call ‘Mary-craft’, by analogy with the African notion of ‘witchcraft’ (Ashforth 1998).
In the first section, I will explain women’s religious backgrounds to understand the form and content of their all-embracing Marian devotion in Paris. The following section will describe their living conditions in Paris to understand why women intensify their Marian devotion in post-migration life. Both sections provide the context for the case study of Emmanuelle in the third section and help us to understand the particular empowerment the migrant women get from their bonding with Mary.
Key to understanding the ways women develop their post-migration devotion are the religious traditions the migrants are familiar with and from which they draw their inspiration: witchcraft and African Christianity. These constitute the background from which meanings are constructed and practices creatively combined (e.g. Notermans 2002). Not only migrants but also religions have been on the move: European Christianity, including the devotion to Mother Mary, first travelled with missionaries to Africa; African Christians subsequently re-interpreted what was offered to them from their own religious traditions which, from a Western Christian moral perspective, were negatively labelled as ‘witchcraft’. In an ongoing process of adaptation and interpretation, African migrants now once again make sense of African Christianity in Europe, taking Mother Mary back from Africa and giving her new meanings by combining the practices related to European Marian devotion (e.g. pilgrimage and souvenir shopping) with African witchcraft and African Christianity. Healing is central in this process as it is here that Marian devotion and African religion find common ground: in both traditions, religion and healing are closely related.
Several correspondences between pre- and post-migration practices may explain the form and content of women’s ritual practices in Paris.
The first one is that religion is not restricted to specific days (Sundays) or locations (churches) but continuously influences all areas of life. The migrants’ intensified devotion can easily be misunderstood as hyperactivity or addiction, fed by loneliness in the French capital. The life-embracing character of their devotion, however, is also rooted in pre-migration religiosity in which the visible and the invisible parts of the universe are seen as intimately interlinked (Mbiti 1991: 29). The permanent interaction with the spiritual world and people’s constant readiness to tap from the power of that world recurs in migrants’ practices in Paris. Whenever they feel in need, they address Mary to improve their everyday life.
Extracting power from the spiritual world via the intermediary work of religious specialists is another correspondence. ‘Certain human beings have the knowledge and the ability’, Mbiti (1991: 166) states, ‘to tap, control and use the invisible powers in the universe’. The assumption that certain people have the ability to mediate these powers also recurs in the religious practices of migrant women in Paris. As the extended case study will show, among the migrant women some come closer to Mary through an intense programme of practising and training and gain the position to mediate Mary’s power and heal others. In both contexts, healing not only concerns the recovery of physical problems (when biomedicine fails to work), but also entails the provision of protection and good luck, as well as the recovery of social relationships (e.g. Notermans 2007; Brown 2011). In African religions, one’s healing capacities, although partly inherited, often become manifest after a serious crisis in one’s personal life (illness, being uprooted, migration) and a subsequent rescue or unexpected healing instigates the transition to mediation and professional medicine (cf. Brown 2011). In both contexts, the person healed from such a crisis achieves a kind of empowerment by acquiring the means to heal other people in return.
Related to the healing work of religious intermediaries is the notion of mediation as ‘work’. The migrant women regard their Marian devotion as ‘work’, which reflects Ashforth’s description of witchcraft. ‘Witchcraft’, Ashforth states (1998: 531), ‘is not a belief but some kind of work, indeed, a craft: a matter of combining knowledge, skill, technique (and technology), and effort to produce results in the world’. Although in African societies the power and knowledge of witchcraft and authority concerning Marian devotion is partly inherited or passed down through generations, the healers also actively build ‘spiritual capital’ (Verter 2003) to develop their knowledge into craftsmanship: they accumulate knowledge, skills, techniques as well as material and symbolic commodities. The migrant women speak about professional competence that requires tough training: knowing the ways to various Marian shrines, building and sustaining networks with priests, travel agents, and shopkeepers, learning the ritual programmes and prayers by heart, studying the various qualities of the objects sold at the shrines, and simultaneously maintaining their relationship straight with Mary. Thus, women’s devotion becomes a life-embracing vocation.
Another relevant correspondence is the central position that travelling and ‘objects-with-power’ (Leyten 2015) occupy in the work of religious specialists. In the same way as African healers travel to faraway forests in search of herbal medicine, migrant women travel to remote European pilgrimage sites to trace powerful souvenirs. In both cases the herbs or souvenirs are put to work as magic medicine. Among objects-with-power in African religions, the largest category is the one of protective objects. Objects such as amulets should be worn on the body to protect a person against evil, illness, death, but particularly black magic or witchcraft. A relevant characteristic of these objects is that they have ‘a double agency: they can be beneficial as well as harmful’ (Leyten 2015: 35). The Marian souvenirs collected during pilgrimage are likewise applied to overcome illness and/or to defeat evil spirits or even kill a person accused of witchcraft. The women thus use the power of Mary for beneficial purposes, in line with Roman Catholic Mariology. But this very same power is also deployed—in sharp contrast to Roman Catholic doctrine—to destroy people. By using those objects as amulets for protection as well as for exterminating evil powers, the women primarily interpret the religious objects and their connections with the sacred from the perspective of African morality.
This brings us to the final correspondence between pre- and post-migration practices: the domain of religious morals. Across Africa, people believe that the power emanating from one and the same spiritual source can be used, as Mbiti (1991: 166) states, ‘for harmful ends, and the people experience it as bad or evil magic. Or they may use it for ends which are helpful to society, and then it is considered good magic or “medicine”’ (see also Geschiere 1982: 114). Spiritual powers are neither evil nor good in themselves; the results they bring depend on how the intermediaries use them. European missionaries, however, considered religious power in terms of a dichotomy between good (related to the divine) and evil (related to the devil and witches) (Merz 2008: 206; see also Horton 1997). This deviates from African religions which, as Mbiti (1991) argues, lacked such strictly dualistic notions of good and evil. Ironically, in missionaries’ attempts to adjust Christianity to local customs (the constructive, positive power of Christianity was said to combat the negative, destructive power of witchcraft), they unintentionally integrated those elements they wanted to eliminate. Instead of witchcraft being replaced by Christianity, witchcraft became a major aspect of African Christianity (see also Meyer 1999; Merz 2008). African Christians adopted the Christianity-versus-witchcraft opposition to distinguish benevolent from destructive divine powers. This duality now recurs in the Parisian context: the migrant women apply Christian Mary-craft to combat African witchcraft—in a witchcraft-way.
The migrant women I refer to in this chapter regularly travel to various Marian sites in Europe: Lourdes (southern France), Fatima (Portugal), and San Damiano (Italy) are the most important ones. But also Banneux, Beauraing (Belgium), Lisieux, and Montligeon (northern France) are frequently visited. The women have francophone West- and Central African homelands (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Senegal) and migrated to France for reasons of marriage, education, or medical treatment. The group of women studied is quite homogeneous in terms of literacy, education, gender ideology, family values, transnational motherhood, and an explicit devotion to Mary which unites them in religious communities in Paris. Apart from pilgrimages across Europe in varied arrangements, they gather in diverse single- and multi-ethnic prayer groups. The women studied also share the (middle) class, independence, and French citizenship that enables them to do their cross-border travelling.
The religious position the women occupy, and the sorrows that motivate their travelling, relate to their specific outlook on life. All the women missed their families in a special way: having one’s family around was not a matter-of-course in the metropolis: long distances needed to be covered to meet them. They also failed to have children around: they had to leave their children behind in Africa or they struggled with infertility. Grown-up children often lived in independent households elsewhere in Paris or the diaspora. This contrasted sharply with their pre-migration life: in West and Central Africa kin are women’s security and social resources and therefore a highly important aspect of identity: of feeling safe, strong, and respected. In African compounds houses are usually thronged with children, marking the social regard and authority of motherhood. And while in Africa child fosterage is a key strategy for women to avoid the social shame and loneliness caused by failing motherhood (Alber et al. 2013), there are limited opportunities to pursue this strategy in Paris. This situation of endangered motherhood seemed to move the migrant women towards Mary as both support and role model.
One of the first European pilgrimage routes that the women choose after migration is the one to Lourdes. The dream to go there has its roots in their African homelands where the veneration of Our Lady of Lourdes was introduced by European missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century. When in France, they learn about other Marian apparition sites such as Rue du Bac in Paris and San Damiano in Italy. Being all Marian sites, they share a religious repertoire of stories (of apparitions, miraculous healings), objects (holy water, candles), rituals (procession, Mass in church), and prayers (Ave Maria), although these simultaneously present a different image of Mary and offer specific rituals (e.g. touching the grotto and bathing in Lourdes, praying in the Rose Garden in San Damiano) and objects (water in Lourdes, medals in Paris, handkerchiefs in San Damiano). Both the similarities and differences between the sites help women to develop their religious capital: their knowledge and expertise on all aspects of Marian devotion. The differences between the sites, in particular, make sense to them as they construct something new and powerful from mixing the spiritual and material cultures encountered at the different sites.
To illustrate my argument, I present the life-history of one particular woman, Emmanuelle, from Congo-Kinshasa. Her religious practices are emblematic for the wider group of African migrant women we studied, and the sites she visited were crucial gathering points for the migrant women who participated in the research. But as an advanced professional, she stood out among her fellow migrant-pilgrims, guiding others into the realm of Marian devotion, as she did for me while doing research in Paris and following her on religious routes.
During the interviews, Emmanuelle structured her story around two critical events: the life-threatening illness and miraculous healing of her daughter in 1996, and her vision of Mary in San Damiano in 2009. The first critical event reveals how she experienced the life-saving power of Mary for the first time and how this stimulated her to explore the Parisian landscape of Marian devotion. The second critical event marks the start of her professional devotion to Mary, her European travelling, and her life-changing decision to work for Mary and to heal in her name. By developing her personal story around the themes of ‘miraculous healing’ and ‘Marian apparition’, Emmanuelle demonstrates her profound knowledge of narrative traditions in the field of Marian devotion: miraculous healing and divine rescue are persistent themes, as they are in published testimonies (cf. Orsi 1985: 193).
Next to these thematic turning points that structure Emmanuelle’s story, she recounts another critical event that I situate in between the two: the unexpected death of her father in Congo. Although she does not relate this event as one that changed her life, it helps us to understand her work with Mary’s divine power. Emmanuelle’s quotes were originally in French; in the following account, I translate them into English.
Emmanuelle was born in 1959 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic Congo. She received a religious education—‘with all sacraments complete’ (baptism, first communion, confirmation, marriage)—and was sent to a school where Our Lady of Lourdes was omnipresent. There was no tradition of making pilgrimages because ‘there are no renowned apparitional sites in Congo and no infrastructure to travel’. After her graduation, she did a one-year secretarial training course and at the age of 21 she got employment as a medical secretary at Kinshasa’s airport. She married and a daughter was born when she was 24 years old. Thanks to the free airline tickets she received yearly from her employer, she spent several holidays in France and Belgium. As Emmanuelle suffered from secondary infertility she decided to go to France for medical checks and treatment in 1990. That is why she left Congo with her husband and daughter with no intention to stay in France. After one year, however, war broke out in Congo, making it impossible to go back.
Emmanuelle’s first years as an illegal migrant in Paris were characterized by loneliness and insecurity. She fervently missed her family and worried about their safety during the war. Her dearest desire to bear more children became unfulfilled as four more pregnancies ended prematurely. In 1996, her precarious situation reached a climax when, on top of marital and reproductive trouble, her only daughter fell seriously ill and was on the verge of dying. This critical moment changed her life as it unexpectedly put her on Mary’s track.
Emmanuelle recounts that her then twelve-year-old daughter suddenly began to suffer inexplicably high fevers. No medical test had revealed the cause of her illness and no medicine helped to reduce the fever. After having spent three months in intensive care, she was given up by the medical team and doomed to die in hospital. Frightened by her daughter’s approaching death, Emmanuelle desperately wandered around in Paris and even considered committing suicide. While roaming in the Parisian underground, a beautiful young girl, a stranger, observed her, approached her and asked what was wrong. After having listened to her story, the girl took her to Mary’s chapel in Rue du Bac. As Emmanuelle did not know the place at that time, the girl showed her around and told her to buy the miraculous medal. She explained how to apply it to her daughter’s body, what prayer procedure had to be followed, and how important it was to have confidence. She then left Emmanuelle leaving no trace. According to Emmanuelle this mysterious woman was sent to her by Mary to help her out and to show her the way to Mary and initiate her in the healing strategies. And indeed, when Emmanuelle returned to the hospital and did as prescribed, the doctor in attendance admitted he had forgotten to do one particular test and subsequently discovered a kidney infection. The child was promptly operated and two days later she left the hospital. Her mother took her to Rue du Bac to thank Mary for this miraculous healing. Emmanuelle says: ‘We now realized we were among the people saved by Mary and I promised Mary to never leave her as she neither left me and my family.’
This was Emmanuelle’s first experience with the powerful miraculous medal and the famous Marian apparition site. She started visiting the chapel in Rue du Bac weekly. This is by far the most popular shrine in Paris, yearly attracting millions of pilgrims from all over the world. According to its foundation legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to the nun Catherine Labouré in 1830 in order to offer the world a miraculous medal. After being first distributed during a cholera epidemic in 1832, when it had supposedly miraculously cured and converted many, this medal became extremely popular and spread across the world (Reader 2014: 161). Ever since the miraculous healing of her daughter, Emmanuelle wears a large copy of this medal, for remembrance, thanksgiving, and protection.
This part of Emmanuelle’s story reveals that she not only recounts her life-history in the Catholic tradition of narrating miraculous healings but also in the African tradition of narrating the initiation of healers. A central theme in these African healing narratives is that a particular person at a moment of extreme despair disappears by going underwater, or, in this Parisian case, underground. After some time of seclusion, an invisible, benevolent figure brings salvation by sending him/her back to the world, and directing him/her to the path of becoming a healer. In this narrative tradition, becoming a healer is a way of regaining agency and empowerment (Brown 2011: 224).
Within her Christian belief Emmanuelle now found a point of orientation, both spiritually (Mary), spatially (the chapel and other pilgrimage sites), and materially (the souvenirs). She discovered she could use the power of Mary to get a grip on her situation and even to heal and act as a mediator. Emmanuelle bought more of the miraculous medals to send these back home as travelling medicine. Now that she knew she could save her family in Paris from illness and death, she started to use the medals in her cross-border care: sending them to relatives in the home country, believing they would travel with Mary’s protection over large distances, replacing her own, yet impossible, travel to Africa.
Being a serial visitor to the Marian chapel in Rue du Bac, Emmanuelle now began to build spiritual capital: she learned about the history of the shrine, the apparition of the Virgin, and the life of the visionary; she got to know the different qualities of the medals and the rituals to be executed to charge them with Mary’s power. She invested lots of time, crossing the Parisian metropole to reach the shrine, to select and buy the medals, to sit next to the main statue, to write accompanying letters to the Virgin to be deposited in a special mailbox, and to get the souvenirs blessed by the nuns or priests running the shrine. With all these steps taken, she assured the medals to turn from motionless commodities into ‘objects-with-power’ (Leyten 2015): animated shields for protection, charged with Mary’s power.
When sending a medal to her ten-year-old nephew who had declining school results because of vision problems, and another one to her cousin who was in military service to protect him and his family during the war, she achieved immediate success: her nephew was rapidly healed and no harm came to her cousin. Now having confidence in the capacities of Mary’s travelling power, she sent a medal to her father who fell badly ill in 2002. While she expected the medal to help him, the medal killed him instead. According to Emmanuelle the medal apparently was too powerful for him. When it was put under his pillow, he dreamt there was a Lady showing him that he was going to burn. Emmanuelle explained that ‘the rays of light coming from Mary’s hands are blessings for us but fire for those who do wrong’. Her father admitted he did wrong to people by blocking their luck. He first promised to stop doing evil but when he resumed his bad behaviour, he promptly died. Although the sending of the medal had an unexpected outcome, it confirmed the power and justice of Mary’s actions even when killing her own father. It also confirmed the power of Emmanuelle’s cross-border interventions and empowered her as a lonesome mother who could not cross borders but still felt the duty to protect her relatives from evil forces.
By visiting the Rue du Bac chapel regularly and attending the Sunday meetings of different prayer groups in Paris, Emmanuelle learned about the European network of Marian sites and discovered the possibility of travelling to other shrines. One of these shrines was the Marian apparitional shrine in San Damiano in northern Italy, which soon became her favourite destination. In 2009, she met a woman from Central African Republic who told her about the shrine and took her there as a guide. During this first pilgrimage, an exceptional experience gave her devotion an extra boost. Emmanuelle recounts:
I saw the Madonna in the morning sun! I’d asked Mary to give me a sign to prove that she was present there. And there she was, with the crown and the rays coming from her hands. I clearly saw her in the sun, the sunlight didn’t even hurt my eyes. I started singing in my language Lingala and said: Thank you mamma, thank you mamma! Then, the sun started to swing. Mary was dancing on my song and I was so happy that I wanted to run to hold her.
Now that the Madonna had given her a sign, Emmanuelle felt she had to do something in return. She started to do volunteer work (receiving pilgrims and cleaning rooms) at the San Damiano pilgrimage site, two weeks a year, and intensified her religious life in Paris to pay honour to Mary. Her socialization into the habitus of pilgrimage culture started here.
Having that close relationship with Mary, she felt encouraged to articulate her goals and to ask Mary for all she needed as a vulnerable migrant in Paris. Mary promptly answered all her prayers: a visit back home, French citizenship, a visa for her younger sister’s son to stay with her, and her own apartment. ‘Mary’, Emmanuelle says, ‘unblocked everything that had been blocked.’ Having the right travel documents now, she started to be a serial pilgrim on various routes across Europe, in particular the one to San Damiano. With her expanded travel and eagerness to learn about the related histories, prayers, liturgy, ritual programmes, objects, and souvenir markets, Emmanuelle developed her skills and knowledge as a Marian expert in order to do for others what Mary had done for her: unblocking people’s luck, protecting and healing them.
A first important feature of Emmanuelle’s Mary-craft is her knowledge of all site-specific aspects of the Marian shrines she visits: the history of the shrine with all events remembered in chronological order, the apparitions that have happened there, the visionary’s life, the shrine’s topography, familiarity with rituals and doctrine, the objects sold at the shrine and the rituals done there, and, finally, what specific graces could be received at what moments, at what place, and through what rituals. Her training was directed to mastering prayers and formulas of blessing in different languages, and learning how to combine prayers, souvenirs, and ritual actions for healing purposes.
To convince me of the hardships of such an intense training in San Damiano, she told me:
You have to be instructed and skilled to endure the prayer sessions that last 1½ hours, three times a day. It demands high concentration. In the beginning, it was hard to finish the ritual programme, including prayer rounds, Masses, and processions. The Latin language, in particular, was hard to understand. I had to learn a complete new language, the language meant for praying, the language that connects us with heaven. I also had to train myself in doing all rituals at the right moment. Time is important, all rituals start right on time. You have to concentrate and plan your day efficiently to get everything done.
By emphasizing her lack of skills and disorientation at the start of her career, she tells me how much knowledge she has gained meanwhile. Now that she has great expertise in this field, she devotes her religious work to others. Dealing with Mary’s power also demands dealing with shopkeepers, another field with which she has made herself familiar and competent.
Emmanuelle is well informed about price fluctuations and always able to negotiate a deal. Shopping is part of the work to be done at the site. During her pilgrimage in 2012, Emmanuelle bought about 300 rosaries and 500 white handkerchiefs to be shipped back home. She also bought lots of prayer leaflets to be sent and distributed together with the rosaries and the handkerchiefs.
The power in the souvenirs is not automatically there, the items have to be imbued with Mary’s power. Emmanuelle has built the know-how to do this over the years and across different Marian sites, as each site has a particular charging ritual to offer. These charging rituals animate the objects with Mary’s power and turn the commodities into powerful protective items. Officially this work is reserved to priests. Although Emmanuelle always asks the priests to bless her merchandise, she also takes part in this. The ‘imbuing-with-power’ work is, in addition to praying and shopping, part of Emmanuelle’s religious work during her travels: getting the priestly blessing, giving the objects a rest next to the Blessed Sacrament in the church, putting them at the feet of Mary’s statue in the chapel, rubbing them against the grotto in Lourdes, putting them in the sunlight in San Damiano, or articulating special (Latin) prayers over them. These are all ritual animations of the souvenirs, calling Mary into the mass-produced, not-yet-enchanted objects.
The enchanted souvenirs have become ‘medicine’: ready to heal people from illness caused by invisible powers and to screen them from these powers. Now having the post-migration expertise in Marian devotion, Emmanuelle creatively uses her African religiosity and knowledge of African healing strategies to get something new and powerful from both traditions. The new dimension she adds is the combination she makes of different souvenirs/medicines in order to reach an optimal effect. To illustrate how European Marian devotion and African witchcraft merge in Emmanuelle’s interpretation of the objects, I will discuss the Marian souvenirs as medicine in the following section.
Let us first return to the power of the Parisian miraculous medal. Emmanuelle describes the medal’s protection and healing power as chasing or destroying the devil and releasing someone’s luck. They unblock what has been blocked with magical power. By sending a medal to her relatives back home, she helps them to shield evil spirits and overcome illness and misfortune. When the medals work promptly, Emmanuelle understands that the problem is caused by black magic, done by someone who wanted to hurt them and bring bad luck. ‘Medals not working immediately’, Emmanuelle explained, ‘show that it is a normal malady to be cured by doctors in hospital. When the malady is a result of magic, Mary will waste no time and heal instantly’. Consistent with African notions of religious power Emmanuelle uses spiritual power for both healing and killing: to remove obstacles the medal may even kill the people who cause these obstacles, as was the case with her father. Emmanuelle thus adopts the (missionary) idea of Mary combatting witchcraft while also attributing killing forces to her and employing her power to combat evil forces. She uses different Marian objects to achieve various goals, for example to protect people from the devil or to exorcise.
The combining of souvenir-medicine taken from and charged at different pilgrimage sites makes Emmanuelle’s healing work particularly strong. Each souvenir is taken as complementary to another one. According to the problem or illness she is faced with, Emmanuelle prescribes a specific combination of medal, scapular, rosary, handkerchief, holy water, or prayer leaflet, together with precise instructions for their use. In the same way as medical doctors prescribe different medicines to be taken differently, Emmanuelle prescribes for each particular illness a specific combination of souvenirs-medicines to be applied differently. To relatives back home, she also sends small amounts of holy water, to be mixed with their drinking, cooking, and washing water or to be sprinkled over their house for protection. They may also use it as medicine for any ailment by drinking it or applying it to the skin.
Emmanuelle’s use of enchanted souvenirs as religious medicine resembles the way African healers (negatively labelled as ‘witch doctors’) use medicinal plants, leaves, herbs, and tree bark in their treatments. As a good Christian, however, she openly denies any association with African healing and witchcraft practices. Although in her verbal accounts she emphatically contrasts the Marian souvenirs with the medicinal plants African healers work with, her ritual actions and healing practices correspond: being initiated in secret knowledge, receiving a training in seclusion, travelling to faraway places to pick the different medicines, combining different medicines in treatments, taking medicated baths, articulating spells/prayers, and wearing protective amulets on the body.
Interestingly, both Emmanuelle’s healing practices and the corresponding African religious practices do not differ so much from protective practices in the lived religion of European Marian devotees. European Catholics also used to wear the miraculous medal and the scapular for protection and to ward off the devil. In a Dutch journal Stemmen uit Lourdes (‘Voices from Lourdes’), published in 1927, a woman describes how she was attacked and possessed by several devils the day ‘she forgot to wear her scapular, so big that it covered nearly the whole body’ and was saved when she put it on (Rothoff 1927: 118–19). Orsi, studying Italian migrants in New York, also mentions the scapulars that devotees take from the shrine ‘to guard the body and protect the soul’, for cure, consolation, and comfort (1985: 173, 202). Plenty of other examples indicate the same use of Marian ‘amulets’ in European popular traditions. Creating a dichotomy between ‘modern’ European Marian devotion and ‘traditional’ African witchcraft, although often publicly articulated by both Church officials and African migrants like Emmanuelle, does not do justice to people’s lived religion. Different religious traditions (Marian devotion, European pilgrimage, African witchcraft) intersect in the domain of healing; it is at this junction that Emmanuelle develops her Mary-craft.
Significant in Emmanuelle’s account is that she not only attributes higher powers to Mary vis-à-vis evil spirits, but that she also gives herself a higher position vis-à-vis other people lacking the knowledge and methods for evoking those powers. People respect her, she says, ‘because she is so close to Mary and Jesus’. Emmanuelle finds herself in the position of a powerful intermediary, buying and distributing Mary’s souvenirs, imbuing them with divine power and producing all kinds of healings. The work also imbues her with Mary’s power: it empowers her to act on behalf of Mary. Herewith she upgrades her position in her Parisian network of co-pilgrims and in her transnational social field of relatives and friends. As a skilled Marian expert, she is now the one paving the way for newcomers (novices/initiates), taking them along the pilgrimage routes to the various shrines, showing them around and guiding them through all relevant rituals. Being close to Mary, she knows how to approach her, how to please her, and how to get the things done by her. She also feels empowered as a marginalized migrant mother, who initially could not help her family across borders and struggled with loneliness and emptiness. She now protects her relatives across continents while her religious network in Paris replaces in many ways the relatives she misses back home: for socializing, practical and emotional support, and religious orientation (see Notermans et al. 2016).
Although Emmanuelle’s story is a very personal one, her problems in post-migration life—loneliness, threatened motherhood, dispersed family—resemble those of the other women I studied. They all intensified their religion and trained themselves as Marian experts along the European pilgrimage routes to solve their problems and/or become a healer. But there is more than just a shared experience; they also stay in close contact with each other.
Building a professional track as a Marian devotee is a learning process the women go through not only individually but also collectively. They feed each other’s religious capital by exchanging their techniques and souvenirs, and, to a certain extent, their secret knowledge of powerful medicine. Some pilgrimages are jointly undertaken, others separately; in the latter case the relevant information is shared during the meetings in the various Parisian prayer groups or when visiting each other at home. By giving guidance, input, and inspiration, the women encourage each other’s travelling and simultaneously respect each other’s status and empowerment. Although the specific capacities of the women are fully appreciated in their communities of origin, in Europe their craftsmanship is scarcely recognized beyond their own group of Marian devotees. They therefore mutually depend on each other for respect and recognition.
Women’s cooperation in Marian pilgrimage enables them to build new networks of solidarity that transcend pre-migration ethnic and kinship networks. Through investing in a reciprocal relationship with Mary and other Catholic West African migrant women in Paris, women acquire not only spiritual capital but social capital as well. The empowerment women gain through bonding with Mary thus not only emanates from the self-confidence and capacity to influence their living circumstances as migrants in the metropolis, but also from the communitas (Turner and Turner 1978) it creates between the women who support and inspire each other in their travelling and devotion. In a joint enterprise they create a migrant community of spiritual sisters or co-travellers who support each other, replace the missing family back home, and provide a feeling of home and belonging in the new migratory environment (see Notermans et al. 2016).
This chapter revealed how migrant women with an African Catholic background and living in Paris appropriate the routes, rituals, and material culture of Marian devotion in present-day Europe. Rather than focusing only on issues of belonging and community-building, I tried to understand the form, content, and meaning of women’s increased post-migration religiosity. Women’s newly created and intensified piety emerged from pre-migration religious traditions in which Marian devotion was present but not dominating. By indicating that African witchcraft and the Marian devotion of the migrant women in Europe are corresponding and complementing practices, I argued that migrant women in Paris develop their Marian devotion into a craftsmanship to combat African witchcraft—in a witchcraft-way. The migrant women integrate present-day pilgrimage routines into pre-existing worldviews and healing strategies and put them to work in a transnational context of dispersed families and a Parisian context of lonely women seeking a community where they can feel safe and respected.
Central in the different domains of bonding—with Mary, the family back home, and the Catholic multi-ethnic migrant community in Paris—are the small Marian souvenirs used as protective amulets and healing medicine. Women travel across a wide network of European Marian sites to buy these items, charge them with Mary’s power, and subsequently offer them to those who are in need of help. By working as Mary’s intermediaries with powerful objects, the women also empower themselves, as marginalized migrants in Paris and vis-à-vis their family in Africa. Like an African healer ‘who has learned to utilize witchcraft positively and derives prestige from it’ (Geschiere 1982: 112), the migrant women build their reputation in the religious world of witchcraft which gives them authority.
The pilgrimage souvenirs and their healing capacities have been neglected in previous studies on migrant communities and cross-border care, although some studies considered amulets sent from the homeland to the migrants suffering from loneliness and disruption (e.g. Grønseth 2012). Grønseth (2012: 130) argues that the moving amulets give the migrants a feeling of belonging and well-being. By touching, smelling, eating, and drinking the religious materials, feelings of being safe and at home would be generated across time and space. The present study adds to this that the European pilgrimage souvenirs are also reinterpreted as medicine and sent by the migrants to relatives in Africa for protection and healing, at the same time binding people within transnational and Parisian communities and empowering the actors themselves. In this way, European pilgrimage and African Mary-craft are closely connected. And African witchcraft—migrants’ pre-migration religious capital—is again confirmed in modern European Christianity.