Ex Voto

Some photos of the pictures grateful believers have designed and/or commissioned and left at Altotting’s chapel of grace, the shrine of the black Madonna of Altotting which is said to house a miraculous grace-granting statue of Virgin and child. On our way home now but it’s been a very interesting day; quite moving too, to visit the chapel itself, mostly in darkness but encrusted with silverware and with the small limewood figure (lavishly ‘dressed’) at its focal point. The figure dates from the 1330s.

Also to look at the hundreds (I’m not exaggerating) of pictorial plaques thanking the Virgin for prayers answered. Looking at the ex voto pictures one can see that situations asking for and granting intercession are of the usual human sort – accident, illness and operations; children, rescue from fires. Also many of a distinct agrigultural bent, reflecting the history of this place: painted stick-people crushed by farming machinery, bulls, horses. The Madonna has helped, all these pictures say, in visual form (with Mary usually shown hovering over the scene of sickness or devastation) and writing too: Maria hat geholfen.

The place has a venerable history as regards a sacred presence, but two miracles in 1489 helped establish it as a strong local Marian shrine and place of pilgrimage:

“A three year old boy fell in the water in Altoetting and after half an hour is pulled out dead. The mother, professing a great trust in the Virgin Mary carries the dead child to the Chapel of Grace and lays him on the altar, falls softly to her kneed and begs for her child’s life to be extended. No sooner said than done the child comes back to life” (Report by the dean of the cloister Johannes Scheitenberger (1623-1648); and secondly: “A farmer from Altoetting led a cart of oats to his house and sat his six year old son on the horse; the child fell from the horse under the cart, and was so badly crushed that there was no more hope for him. A prayer was said and the Virgin Mary addressed and the next day the child was fit and healthy again” (Chronicle of the Jesuit Jakob Irsing from the 17th century).

Two early examples of Lazarus syndrome, where death is pronounced prematurely, without giving the remarkable human body the time it sometimes needs to somehow reorientate itself towards living, in spite of seemingly irreparable trauma? Or simply a rurual version of a dodgy urban myth: wishful thinking for the faithful in what must have been fairly desperate times, with fatal accidents a frequent occurrence. Or something else altogether. Strangely comforting, even for one hovering on the edges of spiritual awareness, to see all those ex votos with their ever present maternal figure, surrounded by an aureole of heavenly light, present and watchful, eternally hovering herself in our human skies.

I write on the train back, with two bottles in my bag. The first filled with water from the Brother Konrad fountain, consecrated in 1930 on the day of said Brother’s beatification – a Capuchin monk who for many decades was a kindly and compassionate porter of his monastery. The water is said to have special healing powers as it flows over a relic of the Saint, presumably garnering some kind of aqueous grace by a process of transference. My second bottle is 0.2 litres of the potent sounding ‘Altottinger Krauterlikor’; a herbal substance of 40% alcoholic proof, and with a lovely silvery picture of the Altotting Madonna on its glass bottle. I suspect each will be memorable in its own way.