[1] Saint Sarah also shares her name with the Hindu goddess Kali who is a popular deity in northern India from where the Romani people originate.

[4] (The natives of Berenice Troglodytica had ancestors who once came from the Malabar Coast, through Indo-Roman trade relations, and settled in Egypt (Roman province) and intermarried with Egyptians.)

Though the tradition of the Three Marys arriving in France stems from the High Middle Ages, appearing for instance in the 13th century Golden Legend, Saint Sarah makes her first appearance in Vincent Philippon's book The Legend of the Saintes-Maries (1521), where she is portrayed as "a charitable woman that helped people by collecting alms, which led to the popular belief that she was a Gypsy."

[citation needed] Some authors have drawn parallels between the ceremonies of the pilgrimage and the worship of the Hindu goddess Kali (a form of Durga), subsequently identifying the two.

These ideas were popularized by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Eron Manusov's Ahavah's Dream,[12] and The Maeve Chronicles by Elizabeth Cunningham.