Un corps qui fait images: le rituel de la crucifixion (Liban)

Abstract

Every year, on Good Friday, Catherine, a Maronite mystic, wife and mother of three, relives Christ’s sufferings in the course of a ritual known as insilâb (crucifixion). She unveils the wounds on her body to a crowd of worshippers gathered around her. Although this ritual is in keeping with a long imitatio Christi tradition formalized and theorized over the centuries, as well as following a predetermined and predictable ‘script’, it entails moments of disorder. This is because the insilâb is centred on an ‘enigma body’ which ‘condenses’ the Virgin and her Son, the saint and her believer. As a living icon offered to the sight and touch of hundreds of worshippers, her body blurs the border between the divine and mundane worlds; the sacred and the profane; female and male; parent and child; past and present; image and living person.