Black Madonna

After several decades of modern archeological practices, scholars now have a fuzzy snapshot of Gallic religious life before the Romans.  It is this snapshot that I will use to find any connection between Druidism and the appearance of Black Madonnas in France.  For this paper, I will use references from Celtic historians and archaeologists as well as work from scholars of French cathedrals and churches to see if the Black Madonnas make their appearances at sites sacred to the preChristian Gaels.  In addition to this study, I will review Gallic  deities to see if the Celtic tribes of France did indeed venerate a goddess who could be considered to be their own version of a Black Madonna, a goddess of justice with compassion.

Amen exposes the foundation of all religious myths and conspiracy theories that are based on the existence of a global and Divine Plan for mankind. Amen reveals the truth about the Knights Templar, the Baphomet, Jesus, the Great Mother, the Dragons and the Grail Bloodline.

What is the venerated image that remains as a trace in the minds of the faithful? The one that can be seen on the altar of the church all year round or the one that can be seen only once a year during the patronal feast? Starting from these questions, in this essay we trace the origins of some Sicilian Marian representations, and in particular of the simulacrum of the Madonna del Soccorso or of the Miracles of Caltabellotta (AG). It is a research still in a nutshell that proposes a key to interpreting the unpublished Marian iconography that starting from the morphological and iconographic analysis, passing through the biology of images of Warburgian memory, arrives at animism and ritual performance.

Qual’è immagine venerata che resta come traccia mestica nella mente dei fedeli? Quella che tutto l’anno si può osservare sull’altare della chiesa o quella che solo una volta l’anno si può vedere durante la festa patronale? Partendo da queste domande in questo saggio si tracciano le origini di alcune raffigurazioni mariane siciliane, e in particolare del simulacro della Madonna del Soccorso o dei Miracoli di Caltabellotta (AG). È una ricerca ancora in nuce che propone una chiave di lettura dell’iconografia mariana inedita che partendo dall’analisi morfologica e iconografica, passando per la biologia delle immagini di warburghiana memoria, approda all’animismo e alla performance rituali.

From a book restoring the hypothetical original version of the Gospel of John, in which the centrality of Mary called Magdalene is recovered, comes this discussion of the black madonna artistic tradition of Mediaeval Europe and elsewhere in the world. The contention is that many of these are not of the Virgin Mary but rather the younger Mary, and reasons are given for why it is rare that modern art historians are willing to entertain that possibility. Issues of badly conceived attempts at restoration, especially in Chartres, are also considered.

En la época medieval, María Magdalena desempeñó un papel fundamental. Goodwin observa: “En las leyendas medievales esto se demuestra a través de la historia que fusiona a María Magdalena con María, hermana de Marta y Lázaro (Lucas 10:38–42), donde María y su hermana Marta reciben a Jesús en su hogar. Marta se apresura a preparar la comida, pero María se sienta a los pies de Jesús y escucha. Cuando Marta reprende a su hermana por no ayudarla, Jesús dice que María ha escogido “lo correcto” (Lucas 10:42). Esto luego se hace realidad en La Leyenda Dorada cuando, después de su tiempo de predicación en Francia, María Magdalena se retira al desierto durante treinta años de 'vigilia, oración, ayuno y contemplación celestial' como María de Egipto (Garth. 1950. P.54 ). El énfasis de María Magdalena en aprender de Jesús mientras lo sigue como discípulo le permitirá a Pedro confiar lo suficiente en ella, más adelante en la historia, para navegar a Francia y convertir no solo a los paganos que encuentra allí, sino también al Rey y la Reina de Marsella.
Ella continúa diciendo: “María Magdalena todavía es considerada como una apóstol importante en las leyendas medievales; este es quizás su papel apostólico más explícito. Ella sigue siendo la “apóstol de los apóstoles”, como en los evangelios canónicos, pero este papel se amplía. Este aspecto de las leyendas a menudo se llama la 'vita apostolica' (Shaberg. 2004) y es el papel principal de María Magdalena en su representación medieval. Después de la ascensión de Jesús, Pedro, el líder de la iglesia, envía a María Magdalena y a otros a Provenza. Con la gracia de Dios sobreviven a una tormenta y aterrizan en la costa sur de Francia y se refugian bajo un templo pagano. Al ver a la gente adorando en el templo, comienza a predicarles y los convierte al cristianismo. Esto da comienzo a una larga carrera de María Magdalena evangelizadora del cristianismo en Francia (Shaberg. 2004). El Acta Santorum, un grupo de textos que examinan la vida de los santos, la llama "la mujer más evangélica, la amante más ferviente, la Apóstol de los Apóstoles" (Garth. 1950. P.98). María Magdalena a menudo realiza milagros en la literatura medieval para probar sus enseñanzas y validar lo que está predicando: por ejemplo, facilita que el Rey y la Reina de Marsella tengan un bebé y devuelve la vida a la Reina después de que ella muere en el parto. También le muestra a la Reina lo que ve su esposo cuando asiste a una peregrinación con Peter. Es una apóstol eficaz porque, a través de su penitencia (es considerada como la santa patrona de los pecadores), y con referencia a su propia conversión, es capaz de instar a las personas a seguir su ejemplo y convertirse a las enseñanzas que la convirtieron a ella ( Garth. 1950).”

The famous Mexican icon known as a depiction of la Virgen de Guadalupe shares that name with a Black Madonna from Spain. Both works of art have apparition stories attached to them.This paper engages in a theological thought experiment, exploring what the implications might be if both stories were true (a plausible assumption within the paradigm of the faithful).

This article describes the beliefs and some of the ritual practices of a group
of female pilgrims visiting places in France and Catalonia that they associate
with the figure of Mary Magdalene. It pays particular attention to the pilgrim’s process of learning ways to relate to her own body and to her menstrual cycle. Drawing elements from neo-paganism these women reinterpret
the meaning of Christian symbols and places. They consider Mary Magdalene both as a forerunner of feminism and as a model for independent
women. Performing a ritual of offering menstrual blood to the earth, they
establish an intimate relationship with what they identify as the “Mother
Earth”. Theories used to justify the beliefs in the sacrality of menstrual
blood are largely derived from anthropological texts.

/15/15 " Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available… an idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose. " —Sir Frederick Hoyle (British Astronomer), 1950 On July 20, 1969, when I was eleven years old, my little body strained toward the television screen, my hands gripping the carpet, as I beheld Her, whole, for the first time. I leaned closer, frustrated with Walter Cronkite's insistence on talking about astronauts and overlooking what I was certain was a glimpse of the Earth. Why, was that not the BIG moment? We are still processing that moment and have yet to fully integrate that shared experience of seeing that first image of Earth from space. " Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun. " —Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, 1974 My life's trajectory changed that day. Perhaps yours did too. I realized that life was a great mystery and I made a conscious decision to open fully to it. Unbeknownst to me, that choice severed me from the prevailing winds of the cultural narrative. Instead, my return to the Ancient Mother and to the Earth herself had been initiated. Since then, my life has been dedicated to leading others back to their mother, the Earth. My paternal grandmother came to live with us after her husband (my grandfather) died of a stroke at age 69. Her deep relationship with the Earth and its wisdom revealed a way of learning so different than what I learned in school. She brought to me an informal education of tremendous value, a life way in harmony with nature's laws. I recognized that she had an uncommon wisdom not found in books. The Earth mother had found a way to show me life with the bonds of nature still intact and a power of transmission unspoken—and for many, unnoticed. At age 14, the next decision point set me fully on my path: I elected not to be baptized and take vows proclaiming one way to God. There was not one iota of ambiguity in my deeply felt sense that God was being made too small and that the founder of this religious thinking, a man called Rutherford, could not see far enough if he projected such an interpretation onto the source of all creation. That denomination's prescribed narrative did not—could not—embrace my direct experiences as an empathic seer into the subtle realms, nor my interactions with devas, sprites, and the like. Decades later, it became clear that it was at that tender age I had chosen the path of return to the Mother. The primordial knower was alive and well in the weave of my DNA and was protecting me from falling into the collective trance based in the illusion of separation. From that choice point, I was forever rendered averse to vows that would allow for societal scripts to run as a default, to prevent my full awakening as a part of something so vast that no human could explain it all. I was no longer looking for answers from books or my fellow humans and rejected any narrative that separated me from the living Earth, the living universe, and the source of all creation.

This article examines one of the most fascinating dynamics within
the foundation story of Ethiopia’s Royal Solomonic Dynasty, the
Kebra Nagast (Glory of Kings), the metaphor that connects Mother
Mary with the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Throughout the Kebra
Nagast, it is written that just as the Ark served as the vehicle by which
the Ten Commandments of the Law were given unto humanity, so
too would Mary serve as the perfected and purified vehicle for Christ.

    The prominence of women such as Mary and Queen Makeda (the
Queen of Sheba) in the theology and polity of Ethiopia is indicative
of African traditions that have been described as matriarchal, matri-
lineal, dual-sex and matrifocal. These traditions explain the promi-
nence of Mary and Makeda within Ethiopian Orthodox traditions, as
an African matrifocality reaching from the Old to the New
Testaments, with Queen Makeda serving as a prefiguration of
Mother Mary.

    This matrifocality is informed by pre-Axumite archeological finds
of female statues in northern Ethiopia, and the historical reigns of
Egyptian Queen Mother Tiye, and the Lady Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
This represents a retention of women-centered African values
within Ethiopian Orthodox traditions. Values once prominent and
shared throughout the Nile Valley.