In hot-pants or battledress, recently reborn Madonna wowed French fans with her new-found mysticism at the first of a string of concerts in Paris on Wednesday night.

Images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and words in Hebrew flitted across the stage while the T-Shirt she threw into the ecstatic crowd of 15,000 fans read “Kabbalists Do It Better“.

The 46-year-old artist, who recently changed her name to Esther after converting to the ancient mysticism of Kabbalah, threw the spotlight on the material worries of the world as an apparent reflection of her concerns for personal as well as global peace.

For hits such as “Vogue” and “Frozen” at the first of four Paris concerts, Madonna wore hot-pants, thigh boots and a silver top. For “American Life” a beret and battledress. But throughout the duration of the one-hour-40-minute show, came anti-war video images of helicopters, tanks, atomic blasts and wounded children as well as dummies of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.

Famished African children featured in the backdrop to accompany her version of John Lennon’s “Imagine“, which closed with a Palestinian and Israeli child walking side by side.

Once her current “Re-Invention” world tour is closed this month, Madonna plans a pilgrimage-retreat to Israel in observance of her new Kabbalah faith.

The pop diva began looking into Kabbalah, or at least a modern version of it, in 1997 and is now one of its most high-profile proponents.

Source: AFP