george sand's search for spirituality

"Sand’s unconventional religious journey began when she was a child raised by a Voltairean grandmother on an isolated estate in central France.  It was there, she recalled in her autobiography, that lacking a religion she “made one for myself.”  Sand’s childhood religion revolved around an androgynous God she named ‘Corambé,’ who inspired stories told to herself in which the god/goddess charmed and consoled those who suffered.  Sand also received some minimal instruction as a Catholic, enough to satisfy the local priest that she could receive her First Communion.  But it was only at a convent school in Paris, where she spent three years as a teenager, that Sand began to take seriously her Catholic faith.  After a period in which she embraced the ‘devils’ of the school, Sand was transformed by a mystical encounter in the convent chapel in which “a whirling whiteness” passed before her eyes.  Sand recalled a feeling of “indescribable sweetness” and a love that bound her intimately to God, “as if the insuperable obstacle that stood between the hearth of infinite warmth and the dormant flame had been swept away.”  When Sand’s grandmother learned of her religious conversion, and her desire to become a nun, she swept in quickly and took her back to Nohant, the family estate in Berry in 1820. "

Here.