April 17-21 ‘26 Marseille, France, 5 Days
WILD EROS: EMBODYING VENUS
A Writing & Womb Healing Devotional with the Black Madonna & Mary Magdalene
EARLY RATE $1800 UNTIL FEBRUARY 15th
A pilgrimage for women who are ready.
This is an invitation to walk where Mary Magdalene walked, to dance in the places where the sacred feminine has been remembered for thousands of years, to gather with women who refuse to make spirituality small or polite.
For 5 days in Southern France, we'll visit the cave where Mary Magdalene lived for 33 years. We'll sit with the Black Madonna in the ancient crypt beneath Marseille. We'll hike through sacred forests, move our bodies in ritual and dance, and do the kind of womb work that brings you home to yourself.
This is art and devotion woven together.
We'll be based in Marseille - France's oldest city, a working port with ancient roots and raw Mediterranean energy. Not the sanitized Provence of travel magazines, but the real, multicultural heartbeat of the Mediterranean: fishing boats in the old harbor, Greek and Roman ruins, Arabic spices in the market, layers of history written in stone and sea salt.
Come write, weep and heal your womb in devotion to Love, death, life, dying, living authentically and rebirthing with us.
WHY JOIN THIS PILGRIMAGE
So many of us have been taught to make our spirituality small. To be polite. To transcend the body instead of coming home to it. We've learned to bypass our grief, sanitize our rage, and apologize for our desire.
This pilgrimage is the antidote.
Wild Eros is designed to help you:
Reclaim the fullness of your feminine power → Stop splitting yourself into acceptable pieces. Embrace the whore and the holy woman, the rage and the rapture, the grief and the pleasure—all of it sacred.
Write from your womb, not your head → Learn to channel the voice that lives in your body, the one that's been silenced, the one that knows the truth before your mind can catch up.
Break free from spiritual bypassing → Stop performing holiness. Do the real work, shadow, sexuality, rage, grief.
Feel held in deep community → Move from isolation into sisterhood with women who can handle your unpolished truth, who won't ask you to be smaller or softer than you are.
Walk in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene → Not the sanitized saint, but the real one. The apostle. The lover. The witness who refused to look away from death or resurrection.
Decolonize your relationship to the sacred feminine → Unlearn what the patriarchal church taught you about your body, your desire, your power. Remember what the Black Madonna and the Dark Goddess have always known.
Dance, grieve, rage, and heal → Leave with practices you can take home, Body Temple Dance, womb healing, nervous system tools, ritual, not just concepts, but embodied wisdom.
Daily Darshan → (To see and be seen) with the powerful Black Madonna of Marseille
This isn't about fixing yourself. It's about remembering who you've always been beneath the conditioning. It's about coming home to your body as a holy site, your desire as devotion, your rage as sacred fire.
THIS 5 DAY PILGRIMAGE INCLUDES:
April 17th - 21st 2026
Your registration fee covers:
All facilitation, teaching, and programming for 5 days
Transportation to sacred sites
Ceremony materials and ritual supplies
Trip planning support and local recommendations
Dinners on 3 nights
Your registration does NOT include:
Flights to/from Marseille
Airport transfers
Accommodation (hotels, Airbnb, hostels)
Meals and drinks
Personal expenses and spending money
We're keeping the program separate from accommodation so you can choose what works for your budget and style - whether that's hostels, Airbnb, or hotels. We'll provide recommendations and can help coordinate shared housing if folks want to room together.
We're walking where Mary Magdalene walked. Not the sanitized saint they tried to make her. The real one. The apostle. The witness. The lover. The devotee who held death and resurrection in her body and refused to look away.
If you've been told your anger isn't spiritual, your grief isn't holy, your desire is sinful - this pilgrimage is for you.
If you're tired of spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity, and teachings that ask you to transcend your body instead of coming home to it—this is your invitation.
This pilgrimage weaves together sacred sites, embodiment practices, and ritual that doesn't sanitize the shadow or skip over the body to get to the "light."
Pilgrimage to the Cave of Mary Magdalene in Sainte-Baume - the grotto where she lived for 33 years in wild devotion. We'll hike up the mountain through the ancient forest, enter the cave where she prayed and wept, and sit in the darkness with what she carried.
The Yoni Cave - there's a second cave, lesser-known and harder to reach. Not the famous pilgrimage site. This one requires a real hike, off the main path, where tourists don't go. We'll make this journey together for those who want to go deeper.
The Sacred Spring - near the main grotto is a natural water source that has been flowing for thousands of years. Water has always been central to sacred sites, it carries information, facilitates transformation, connects us to the earth. We'll visit this spring and work with the element of water as part of our practice.
The Black Madonna of Marseille - we'll visit the Basilica of Saint-Victor in Marseille, home to Notre-Dame de la Confession (also called Our Lady of the New Fire). This 13th-century Black Madonna sits in one of the oldest Christian shrines in the Western world - a crypt that was a pagan burial site long before Christianity claimed it. The church holds relics of early Christian martyrs, but underneath it all is the older story: goddess worship, earth-based feminine wisdom, the sacred feminine that predates the patriarchal church by millennia.
Body Temple Dance - ecstatic movement, ritual theater, and embodied prayer in a beautiful Marseille dance studio. This isn't performance. This is the body speaking what the mind can't hold.
Embodied Practices - trauma-informed movement and breathwork. Nervous system education. Real talk about what it means to inhabit your body fully, to feel grief and pleasure, to be sexual and spiritual at the same time.
Ceremony & Ritual - creating sacred space for the fullness of feminine experience: rage and rapture, grief and pleasure, the death of who you were and the birth of who you're becoming.
This work is held within what we call the Rose Lineage - a living transmission of feminine wisdom that runs through Mary Magdalene, the Black Madonna, and countless unnamed women who have kept the sacred feminine alive through persecution, erasure, and attempts at assimilation.
It's not a lineage you can trace through papers or certificates. It's something you feel in your body when you're in the presence of women who carry it.
It's the refusal to make spirituality pretty. It's the insistence that the body is holy.
It's the understanding that grief and pleasure are both prayers.
You don't need to be fully embodied, a seasoned practitioner, or spiritually "advanced" to be here. You just need to love god and the earth, and be willing to show up with your sacred heart and steady spine
This immersion is for people who...
✺ Revere the Goddess and explore the decolonizing work of the Dark Goddess as a woman, trans person, or queer person who identifies as a woman
✺ Prioritize intentional introspection just as readily as expression and creation
✺ Treasure making new intimate connections and maintaining a level of accountability and awareness in one another's lives
✺ Who give an absolute fuck about intersectionality and calling each other in and out in the spirit of growth, honesty, and devotion
✺ Are actively invested in community, even if you're navigating difficulties in finding the right one
✺ Have at least a little bit of energy to give, even if you've been knocked down or are actively struggling
✺ Can practice the 3 C's: curiosity, choice, and consent - in your learning, in your practice, and in your relationships
✺ Are neurodivergent-friendly, queer-affirming, and understand that bodies come in all forms
✺ Can handle unpolished, direct communication and don't need everything to be soft and gentle
✺ Are ready to work with the fullness of your experience: joy and rage, pleasure and grief, light and shadow
WILD I DEVOTED I EMBODIED I FREE
WILD I DEVOTED I EMBODIED I FREE
I hadn’t imagined it would be so lush and beautiful. This place, this path, this pilgrimage with Adriana. Pure admiration. Trusting the path as it unfolds, trusting the voice within, worshiping Mother. I am forever in and out of the dark wet womb turned onto life, staring into the welcoming loving embrace of the unknown. I may cry and scream into the void and it echoes back with waves of love showing me whats asking to get free. Reborn into the next moment reminded of my belonging. Mary Magdalene reminds us of the truth that is always within us, the deep knowing that unwinds from our wombs until it reaches our throats. We can feel God, feel Love, in our bodies. In Awe and Grief, Laughing in the void, having the will and courage to be with it, move through it, and get turned on by it. I once feared the feeling, the fire, the water, her voice, my voice, in me, guiding me, and now I search for it in every moment, seeing her everywhere, feeling it in everything, everyone, and every sensation trying to get closer. Listen. Pray. Witnessing the Shakti, fanning the flames of the wild Eros, holding the aliveness, softening into it with gratitude, loving. 🌹❤️🔥Bri Skully
“What a blessing to be at the Magdalene cave with such a powerful and aligned tribe. The whole experience was simply magic - the journey, the roses, the trail, the rituals, the presence, the messages, the body prayers, the intimate shares. An energy of full embodied spiritual bliss anchored through us. A pilgrimage of body, spirit and soul. A feeling of being home🌹❤️Fabiana
🌹 What a journey, so grateful to Adriana & everyone I had the absolute pleasure of spending this time with, memories I will cherish forever 🌹Natalie Shilton
My healing I experienced with descending into the Magdalene Cave was one of finding my way back to The Mother within. I’ve had a painful relationship with “Mother” in my life - one of betrayal and abuse and suffering - so to find this place where I could so deeply bathe in The Mother as nature, as embodied community, as wild eros…it brought a sense of safety and freedom and new relationship that began the mending of this deep Mother Wound. The ability to inhabit my own feminine - Nico Nelson
This retreat was one of the most intense experiences of my life.
The setting, the pilgrimage, the group, the teacher — I found myself inside an amount of love and presence my system did not know how to receive. The more love there was, the louder my shaming voices became. My body went into freeze. Everything in me wanted to disappear. I know this pattern. It’s why I only join retreats with teachers and communities I trust to be fierce shame slayers.
I can only speak from my own experience.
In the caves, my own voice wouldn’t come. Others wailed, cried, sang. All that devotion. All that love. I listened and witnessed it wash over me while I stayed frozen. And still, through that witnessing something ancient moved in my cells. I don’t have words for it. This is not a beautiful story of me joining in and using my voice. But a thin layer of freeze softened. I touched so much grief. Something shifted internally. My body remembered something.
Before the Black Madonna, I cracked open. My inner struggle reached its peak. One voice invited me to kneel, to surrender. Another familiar brutal voice grew louder and was cutting deep: you don’t belong here, she doesn’t want you, you are not important, don’t even try, she will reject you, you are not worthy. This is the voice that usually leaves me powerless and frozen. But this time, another voice rose stronger: go to her. Stand up. surrender.
The tension became unbearable. Something broke through the freeze. I stood up and then collapsed, crying, falling until my belly was flat on the ground before her. In that moment, something in me broke free from what had felt like an unbreakable spell.
And she received me.
I can’t fully explain how important that moment was to me.
My intention for this retreat was simple: to become more me — more of all of me. Being in this retreat is the closest I have ever come to understanding what love really is, and it has profoundly changed how I receive myself. - Sarah Eelen
Investment
Marseille, France April 17th - 21st 2026
This retreat is limited to 15 people. To apply, please complete our application form below. We're seeking women, trans and queer folks who identify as women who are genuinely called to this work and ready to engage deeply. Take your time with the questions and answer from your heart.
Upon acceptance, you'll be required to pay a non-refundable deposit to hold your space. Because of the intimate nature of this gathering and the preparation required, we do not offer refunds. If you're unable to attend, you may transfer your spot to someone else with our approval.
Please apply intentionally. Each person's presence matters in this container.
PAY IN FULL
$1800
PAYMENT PLAN
DEPOSIT $600
*Due upon acceptance, then 2 monthly payments before April 15th
Schedule Overview
Friday, April 17th Evening: Arrival, opening ceremony, intentions, meet the group + dinner
Saturday, April 18th: Body Temple intensive in the morning, embodied practices/nervous system work in the afternoon + dinner together
Sunday, April 19th: Black Madonna at Abbey Saint-Victor in the morning, Body Temple Dance in the afternoon, integration circle in the evening + dinner together
Monday, April 20th: Full-day pilgrimage to Mary Magdalene's Caves, free evening
Tuesday, April 21st: Integration day with morning practice, free time, closing ceremony
YOUR GUIDES
Adriana Rizzolo
Founder, Body Temple Church
Adriana is a somatic healer, mystic, and creator of Body Temple Dance—a devotional practice rooted in Kashmir Shaivism and Southern Italian Shamanism. Her work bridges the ancient lineages of Mary Magdalene and the Black Madonna with trauma-informed embodiment, helping women decolonize their relationship to the sacred feminine. She facilitates through ritual, writing, dance, and the full spectrum of human experience—teaching that the body is both altar and oracle, and that grief, rage, sex, and devotion are all pathways home.
Nico
A Published Photographer, Videographer, Director, and Writer, Devotee of the Great Mother, Rose Path Lineage holder, and ever committed student on the Mystical Path of direct experience. She is a person of the global majority, a woman, and an artist who creates spaces that are liberatory, intersectional, trauma-informed, and deeply devotional for non-linear healing and inner discovery.
Jenna Barnes
Culinary: creatrix, holistic chef, and herbalist using all things wild and delicious. She gathers ingredients from the woods, gardens and farms to weave those with medicinal plants + flavors from her travels. Using the cosmos as her muse, she intuitively crafts vibrant food + libations that deeply nourish the body and uplift the spirit. She dances in the kitchen and sings into the soup-pot.
FAQs
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Pilgrimage Retreat
Location: Marseille, France
Dates: Friday, April 17th - Wednesday, April 21st, 2026
Start Time: Friday, April 17th at 5:30pm
Saturday, April 18th
Sunday, April 19th
Monday, April 20th
End Time: Tuesday, April 21st at 9pm
Duration: 5 days / 4 nights
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Lodging is not included in the fee.
Please have a look at this document for some idea’s of where to stay
Here are a few hotels that are in the area where will be meeting.
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Dinners are included on 17th, 18th, 19th and 21st.
Dinner is NOT included on the day of the Mary Magdalene Cave Pilgrimage.
There are many restaurants and cafes and stores to pick up groceries where you will be able to find delicious breakfasts, snacks, coffee etc.
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Travel is not included.
We will have transport to and from the cave, but you will need to arrange airport transfers/ car rentals.
Please let us know if you need any help organising either of these options - or want to carshare with someone else.
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We have various Payment Plan options available.
Please book intentially - once you’ve registered you are responsible for making all your retreat payments.
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This is a small, intimate gathering where each person's presence matters. A great deal of energy, love, and resources go into preparing these experiences. If you're unable to attend, you're welcome to transfer your spot to someone else, but we're not able to offer refunds.
Payments are non refundable up to 8 weeks before the event
Payment plans must be paid even if the participant decides to not attend.
In extreme cases like close deaths and intense illness we are willing to work with you but we have to have a strict policy to keep our work in integrity and flow.
Thank you for understanding and considering before you purchase.
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Your registration covers all facilitation, teaching, and programming for 5 days, transportation to sacred sites (van rental and gas - please make sure you have some cash to tip the driver), all sessions, ceremony materials and ritual supplies, and trip planning support with local recommendations, + dinner on April, 17, 18, 19, and 21
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Flights to/from Marseille, accommodation (hotels, Airbnb, hostels), meals (apart from dinner on the 4 nights specified) and drinks, and personal expenses are not included. This allows you to choose lodging and food options that fit your budget and preferences. We'll provide recommendations and can help coordinate shared housing if you want to room with other participants.
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This retreat is open to women, trans and queer folks who identify as women, and all who care deeply about revering the Goddess and exploring the decolonizing work of the Dark Goddess. You don't need to be a "seasoned practitioner" or "fully embodied" to be here, just willing to show up authentically.
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The hike to the Magdalene Cave is moderately strenuous (about 45 minutes to 1 hour uphill). We will also be visiting another cave which has a bit more of a strenous walk on rocky paths with some very steep areas going up and coming back down. The Body Temple Dance sessions are adaptable to different ability levels - you move at your own pace. If you have mobility concerns, let us know and we'll work with you on alternatives.
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Absolutely. You don't need any dance experience or training. Body Temple Dance isn't about performance or getting it "right" - it's about letting your body move in its own authentic expression. All levels are welcome.
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Comfortable clothing for movement and dance, layers for varying weather (April in Southern France can be warm but also windy and chilly), good walking shoes for the cave hike, journal and pen, water bottle, and an open heart. We'll send a detailed packing list once you're registered.
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Marseille has an international airport (MRS) with connections from major European cities. You can also take the train from Paris (TGV, about 3 hours). We'll provide detailed arrival information and recommendations once you register.