L’ANNONCIATION

L’annonciation (The Annunciation) is a song proposed on Side B of the single On est tous des imbéciles (1985).

Lyrics and music both by Laurent Boutonnat. And yes, it is definitely a unique experiment. Is it considered to be a successful one or otherwise – you decide. One thing for sure – it is different.

I bet many of you even those who consider yourself Mylene’s “HUGE FANS” have never heard the song. Am I right or am I right? Well, I raise my hand – I have not until I started this project of mine back in March 2021– researching in depth every song of Mylene’s from the beginning of times. And this one came about as a number 3 song after Maman a tort and On est tous des imbéciles.

There was a funny story how Laurent Boutonnat and his collaborator at the time Jérôme Dahan forced their way to the RCA in order to get the recording deal. It definitely shows you how passionate and dedicated they were to their dream of music making. Read more below: Maman a tort

The song L’annonciation is dedicated by Mylène to her father and to Sainte-Thérèse d’Avila (which is written on the back of the cover of the 45 rpm On est tous des imbeciles). Luckily, Max Gautier was still alive and could enjoy the song dedicated to him

“Dedicated to Sainte-Thérèse d’Avila, and to Papa! It was for rhyme. And for pleasure too.” (Mylène Farmer – FR3 Aquitaine – 03/06/1985)

“We must not touch motherhood, even less religion, it is a choice. The dedication to my father is very personal. I had an extensive religious education. I was fascinated for a long time by Saint Thérèse by maintaining a vision of her reduced to a popular image. I wanted to know more, and I looked at her life. She saw God on several occasions, spoke with him. The end of the story is censored.” (Mylène Farmer – ” L’Est Républicain ” – 05/09/1985)

L’annonciation’s copy rights belongs to the RCA and does not appear on any Mylène album, not even the best of Les mots. And that is the reason why it is not included into the collection “Plus Grandir” – The Best-Of of the years 1986-1996 announced by former Mylene’s recording company Polydor Universal Music France. The collection came out last year in August 2021.

Annunciation, also called Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary or Annunciation of the Lord, in Christianity, the announcement by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive a son by the power of the Holy Spirit to be called Jesus (Luke 1:26–38).

Teresa of Ávila, born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, also called Saint Teresa of Jesus (28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), was a Spanish noblewoman who felt called to convent life in the Catholic Church.

A Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic, religious reformer, author, theologian of the contemplative life and of mental prayer, she earned the rare distinction of being declared a Doctor of the Church, but not until over four centuries after her death.

Active during the Catholic Reformation, she reformed the Carmelite Orders of both women and men. The movement she initiated was later joined by the younger Spanish Carmelite friar and mystic John of the Cross. It led eventually to the establishment of the Discalced Carmelites. A formal papal decree adopting the split from the old order was issued in 1580.

Teresa, who had been a social celebrity in her home province, was dogged by early family losses and ill health. In her mature years, she became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal borne out of an inner conviction and honed by ascetic practice.

She was also at the center of deep ecclesiastical controversy as she took on the pervasive laxity in her order against the background of the Protestant reformation sweeping over Europe and the Spanish Inquisition asserting church discipline in her home country.

The consequences were to last well beyond her life. One papal legate described her as a “restless wanderer, disobedient, and stubborn femina who, under the title of devotion, invented bad doctrines, moving outside the cloister against the rules of the Council of Trent and her prelates; teaching as a master against Saint Paul’s orders that women should not teach.”

Forty years after her death, in 1622, Teresa was canonized by Pope Gregory XV. At the time she was considered a candidate for national patron saint of Spain, but this designation was awarded to St. James the Apostle. She has since become one of the patron saints of Spain. However, not until 27 September 1970 did Pope Paul VI proclaim Teresa the first female Doctor of the Church in recognition of her centuries-long spiritual legacy to Catholicism.

Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in 1515 in Ávila, Spain. Her paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a marrano or Converso, a Jew forced to convert to Christianity or emigrate. When Teresa’s father was a child, Juan was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to the Jewish faith, but he was later able to assume a Catholic identity. Her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was a successful wool merchant and one of the wealthiest men in Ávila. He bought a knighthood and assimilated successfully into Christian society.

Previously married to Catalina del Peso y Henao, with whom he had three children, in 1509, Sánchez de Cepeda married Teresa’s mother, Beatriz de Ahumada y Cuevas, in Gotarrendura.

Teresa’s mother brought her up as a dedicated Christian. Fascinated by accounts of the lives of the saints, she ran away from home at age seven, with her brother Rodrigo, to seek martyrdom in the fight against the Moors. Her uncle brought them home, when he spotted them just outside the town walls.

When Teresa was eleven years old, her mother died, leaving her grief-stricken. This prompted her to embrace a deeper devotion to the Virgin Mary as her spiritual mother. Teresa was also enamored of popular fiction, which at the time consisted primarily of medieval tales of knighthood and works about fashion, gardens and flowers. Teresa was sent to the Augustinian nuns’ school at Ávila.

After completing her education, she initially resisted the idea of a religious vocation, but after a stay with her uncle and other relatives, she relented. In 1536, aged 20,much to the disappointment of her pious and austere father, she decided to enter the local easy-going Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation, significantly built on top of land that had been used previously as a burial ground for Jews. She took up religious reading on contemplative prayer, especially Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet (1527). Her zeal for mortification caused her to become ill again and she spent almost a year in bed, causing huge worry to her community and family. She nearly died but she recovered, attributing her recovery to the miraculous intercession of St. Joseph. She began to experience bouts of religious ecstasy.

Her reading of the medieval mystics, consisted of guides to examination of conscience and spiritual exercises and inner contemplation known in mystical terms as oratio recollectionis or oratio mentalis. She also dipped into other mystical ascetical works such as the Tractatus de oratione et meditatione of Peter of Alcantara.

She reported that, during her illness, she had progressed from the lowest stage of “recollection”, to the “devotions of silence” and even to the “devotions of ecstasy”, which was one of perceived “perfect union with God”. During this final stage, she said she frequently experienced the rich “blessing of tears”. As the Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin became clear to her, she came to understand the awful horror of sin and the inherent nature of original sin. She also became conscious of her own natural impotence in confronting sin and the need for absolute surrender to God.

Around the same time, she received a copy of the full Spanish translation of St. Augustine’s autobiographical work Confessions, which helped her resolve and to tend to her own bouts of religious scruples. The text helped her realize that holiness was indeed possible, and she found solace in the idea that such a great saint was once an inveterate sinner. In her autobiography, she wrote that she ‘was very fond of St. Augustine … for “he was a sinner too”.

Around 1556, friends suggested that her newfound knowledge could be of diabolical and not of divine origin. She had begun to inflict mortifications of the flesh upon herself. But her confessor, the Jesuit Francis Borgia, reassured her of the divine inspiration of her thoughts. On St. Peter’s Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ had presented Himself to her in bodily form, though invisible.

These visions lasted almost uninterruptedly for more than two years. In another vision, a seraph drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing her an ineffable spiritual and bodily pain: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire.

He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it …”

The account of this vision was the inspiration for one of Bernini’s most famous works, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Although based in part on Teresa’s description of her mystical transverberation in her autobiography, Bernini’s depiction of the event is considered by some to be highly eroticized, especially when compared to the entire preceding artistic Teresian tradition.

The memory of this episode served as an inspiration throughout the rest of her life and motivated her lifelong imitation of the life and suffering of Jesus, epitomized in the adage often associated with her: “Lord, either let me suffer or let me die.”

Teresa, who became a celebrity in her town dispensing wisdom from behind the convent grille, was also known for her raptures, which sometimes involved levitation. It was a source of embarrassment to her and she bade her sisters hold her down when this occurred. Subsequently, historians, neurologists and psychiatrists like Peter Fenwick and Javier Alvarez-Rodriguez, among others, have taken an interest in her symptomatology.

The fact that she wrote down virtually everything that happened to her during her religious life means that an invaluable and exceedingly rare medical record from the 16th century has been preserved. Examination of this record has led to the speculative conclusion that she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.

Over time, Teresa found herself increasingly at odds with the spiritual malaise prevailing in her convent of the Incarnation. Among the 150 nuns living there, the observance of cloister, designed to protect and strengthen spiritual practice and prayer, became so lax that it appeared to lose its purpose.

The daily invasion of visitors, many of high social and political rank, disturbed the atmosphere with frivolous concerns and vacuous conversation. Such intrusions in the solitude essential to develop and sustain contemplative prayer so grieved Teresa that she longed to intervene.

In March 1563, after Teresa had moved to the new convent house, she received papal sanction for her primary principles of absolute poverty and renunciation of ownership of property, which she proceeded to formulate into a “constitution”. Her plan was the revival of the earlier, stricter monastic rules, supplemented by new regulations including the three disciplines of ceremonial flagellation. For the first five years, Teresa remained in seclusion, mostly engaged in prayer and writing.

In 1576, unreformed members of the Carmelite order began to persecute Teresa, her supporters and her reforms. Following a number of resolutions adopted at the general chapter at Piacenza, the governing body of the order forbade all further founding of reformed convents.

The general chapter instructed her to go into “voluntary” retirement at one of her institutions. She obeyed and chose St. Joseph’s at Toledo. Meanwhile, her friends and associates were subjected to further attacks.

Several years later, her appeals by letter to King Philip II of Spain secured relief. As a result, in 1579, the cases before the inquisition against her, Father Gracian and others, were dropped.

This allowed the reform to resume. An edict from Pope Gregory XIII allowed the appointment of a special provincial for the newer branch of the Carmelite religious, and a royal decree created a “protective” board of four assessors for the reform.

During the last three years of her life, Teresa founded convents at Villanueva de la Jara in northern Andalusia (1580), Palencia (1580), Soria (1581), Burgos, and Granada (1582). In total, seventeen convents, all but one founded by her, and as many men’s monasteries, were owed to her reforms over twenty years.

Over time, Teresa found herself increasingly at odds with the spiritual malaise prevailing in her convent of the Incarnation. Among the 150 nuns living there, the observance of cloister, designed to protect and strengthen spiritual practice and prayer, became so lax that it appeared to lose its purpose. The daily invasion of visitors, many of high social and political rank, disturbed the atmosphere with frivolous concerns and vacuous conversation. Such intrusions in the solitude essential to develop and sustain contemplative prayer so grieved Teresa that she longed to intervene.

The ultimate preoccupation of Teresa’s mystical thought, as consistently reflected in her writings, is the ascent of the soul to God in four stages (see: The Autobiography Chs. 10–22):

The first, Devotion of the Heart, consists of mental prayer and contemplation.
The second, Devotion of Peace, is where human will is surrendered to God.
The third, Devotion of Union, concerns the absorption-in-God.
The fourth, Devotion of Ecstasy, is where the consciousness of being in the body disappears.

Interestingly, in modern times it would be considered levels of meditation. You start from the level 1 – beginners – where you are forming the mental request/prayer and to the most advanced forth level where you are disconnecting from yourself as a limited entity and become no one in no time and no space fully immersed in the cosmic energy transcending dimensions and limits. You then become One with all that is – and that is being with “God”.

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lyrics with translation

Il est entré dans mon lit
Sans un bruit
Sans même troubler la nuit
En moi il a fait son lit
Petite pluie, oublier entre deux cris
Dans mon sein je l'ai maudit
Ce saint esprit

Une larme un frisson c'est l'heure
Celle qui sonne la douleur
Celle où seule on sent son coeur
Qui affleure
Qui se gonfle de sang et meurt
L'ange m'a fait croire au bonheur
C'est un faiseur

Et moi je sais que Dieu existe
Et ça me donne bien du malheur
Et moi je sais que Dieu est triste
Car dans mon ventre
Ça naît ça meurt

Il a traversé mon lit
Comme on fuit
Sans même déranger la vie
Un caillot il m'a trahi
Sans un cri
La vie pour moi c'est fini
Mon sauveur
Mon petit baigneur
Sans toi je meurs

Et moi je sais que Dieu existe
Et ça me donne bien du malheur
Et moi je sais que Dieu est triste
Car dans mon ventre
Ça naît ça meurt

He got into my bed
Without a sound
Without even disturbing the night
In me he made his bed
Little rain, forget between two cries
In my breast I cursed him
This holy spirit

A tear a shiver it is the hour
The one that sounds the pain
The one where only you feel your heart
Which is surfacing
That swells with blood and dies
The angel made me believe in happiness
He's a doer

And I know that God exists
And that makes me unhappy
And I know that God is sad
Because in my belly
It's born it dies

He crossed my bed
As one flees
Without even disturbing life
A clot betrayed me
Without a cry
Life for me is over
My savior
My little bather
Without you I die

And I know that God exists
And that makes me unhappy
And I know that God is sad
Because in my belly
It's born it dies