Abstract
The sites of pilgrimage have always been places in which to surpass oneself, to return to the source and to have a change of scenery. In the midst of modernity they continue to attract large numbers of people where the pilgrim archetype, the pilgrim voyager, the tourist and the holidaymaker all rub shoulders. Certainly, the significance is not the same for all these different types of people. It varies according to the process of socialization, the life environment and the objective conditions of existence. There, we effectively have an echo of the existential experience of the agents and of the different types of collective life. This text wishes to grasp the significance of the pilgrimage in its concrete form at Fatima, among the agents of the popular classes who have interiorized a religious version of the world, and who live as emigrants, marked by a material “lack”, the “loss” of emotional ties and spaces and by the melancholy that all this engenders. Through analysis of the components of this type of pilgrimage (voyage, representation of the tragedy of existence in the promises, situation and life of the crowd) and of the logic which links them together (empty/full; disorder/order) we try to furnish some elements of verification of the following assumption: the pilgrimage to Fatima for this type of agent is at different times the expression of a poetical and mystical experience of space and of time. Analysis of the contents subjacent to our approach will show us that the pilgrimage is a “topic” of popular mysticism. It is there that a link is made between the real history of these popular classes and a “history with a difference”, where a mystical word on their historicity is joined.