The Miserin Lake Virgin Mary: the Ancestor Water Worship
The snow Virgin Mary is worshipped at the Miserin Lake sanctuary. The legend this worship is based on refers to the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Rome in the night of August 4 th , AD 352; on that date it snowed heavily and the Virgin Mary revealed where the Basilica di Santa Maria
Maggiore should have been built. In Champorcher, though, as for many other mountain sanctuaries consecrated to the Virgin Mary, this legend gets narrated in a different way: according to this local version, one day some young shepherds found a statue of the Virgin Mary along the
lake shore and they brought it downstream with them in order to place it in a more suitable place. The day after they found the statue along the lake shore once again, so they decided to build a chapel right there. Actually all these legends refer to the Virgin Mary as holy presence providing water, through snow or the lake itself, fundamental element to farmers. It is not by chance that local Christian rituals evoke pre-Christian rituals, such as the ceremonial cross immersion into water, propitiatory gift offering to the lake and so on. After all even the founding act of the original Miserin Lake chapel (1658) stated that a chapel would have been built exactly where “people had used to go in procession since time immemorial in order to demand for rain and favourable weather for agriculture”. These rituals were obviously linked to the farming season. Its location carries mystical meaning, since it is at the crossroads of four valleys – Champorcher, Valsoana, Fénis and Cogne, all of them already visited in pre-historical ages. The Miserin sanctuary was built, as it stands today, in 1880, on the foundation of chapels already existing in previous centuries. In 2000 the sanctuary was enlarged and its inside was improved. Presently, this dormitory was turned into a mountain hut.
