Have you any education on 'The Black Madonna'? Well come to class, I will share with you all I know...
These are excerpts from a lecture by Dr.Matthew Fox
"Every archetype has its seasons. They come & go according to the deepest, often unconscious, needs of the psyche both personal & collective. Today the Black Madonna is returning. She is coming, not going, & she is calling us to something new (and very ancient as well).
An archetype by definition is not about just one thing. No metaphor, no symbol, is a literal mathematical formula. The Black Madonna meant different things in different historical periods & different cultural settings.
She has comes to challenge us, to shake us up which is an ancient work of Isis.The Black Madonna is Dark & calls us to the darkness...
Darkness is something we need to get used to again. “Enlightenment” has deceived us into being afraid of the dark & distant from it. Light switches are illusory. They feed the notion that we can “master nature” & overcome all darkness with a flick of our finger.
(Meister Eckhart observes that “the ground of the soul is dark.” Thus to avoid the darkness is to live superficially, cut off from one’s ground, one’s depth.)
The Black Madonna invites us into our depths.
This is what the mystics call the “inside” of things, the essence of things. This is where Divinity lies. It is where the true self lies. It is where illusions are broken apart.
She calls us back to the darkness which is mystery itself. She encourages us to be at home there, in the presence of deep, black, unsolveable mystery. To forever remain in AWE.
She is the great Cosmic-Mother on whose lap all creation exists. The universe itself is embraced & mothered by her.
The Black Madonna calls us down to honor our lower chakras. One of the most dangerous aspects of western culture is its constant flight upwards, its race to the upper chakras. The Black Madonna takes us down, down to the first chakras including our relationship to the whole. To the EARTH. To our sexuality (second chakra) & our anger & moral outrage (third chakra).
European culture in the modern era especially has tried to flee from all these elements both in religion & in education. The Black Madonna will not tolerate such flights from The Earth.
Because she honors the direction of down & the lower chakras that take us there, the Madonna Honors The Earth & represents Ecology & Environmental Concerns.
-MOTHER EARTH- is named by her very presence. Mother Earth is dark & fecund & busy birthing. So is the Black Madonna.
“The Black Madonna is also the Queen of Nature, the blesser & agent of all rich fertile transformations in External & Inner Nature, (in the outside world and in the psyche).”
Mother Earth nurtures her children & feeds the world & the Black Madonna welcomes them home when they die. SHE RECYCLES ALL THINGS.
The Black Madonna calls us to the ENVIRONMENTAL REVOLUTION, to seeing the world in terms of our INTERCONNECTEDNESS with all things & not our standing off to Master or Rule over Nature (as if we could even if we tried).
She is an affront to efforts of capitalist exploitation of the resources of the earth including the exploitation of the indigenous peoples who have been longest on the Earth interacting w/ her in the most nuanced of ways.
The Black Madonna sees things in terms of the WHOLE & therefore does not countenance the abuse, oppression or exploitation of the many for the sake of financial aggrandizement of the few!
She has ALWAYS stood for justice for the oppressed & lower classes (as distinct from the lawyer classes). She urges us to STAND-UP to those powers that, if they had their way, would exploit her beauty for short term gain at the expense of the experience of beauty that future generations will be deprived of.
The Black Madonna calls us to living SPIRITUALLY & radically on this planet & NOT SUPERFICIALLY & Unthinkingly & Oblivious to the grace that has begotten us in so many ways.
She -CALLS US- to enter into the depths of our pain, suffering & shared grief—not to run from it or cover it up with a myriad of addictions.
She calls us to the depths of our Creativity & to entertain the images that are born in and through us. And she calls us to the depths of transformation, of social, economic, gender, racial & Eco justice.
The Black Madonna calls us to our Divinity which is also our Creativity. She calls us inside, into the “kingdom/queendom of God” where we can co-create with Divinity & feel the rush of Divinity’s holy breath or spirit.
~But to call us to Divinity is to call us to our Responsibility To Give Birth~
Because the Black Madonna is black, she addresses the fundamental phobia around race & differences of color & culture that come with race & ethnic diversity.
God as Mother, not just Father. God as Birther, not just Begetter. Gender diversity is honored by the Black Madonna and so too is gender preference.
The Black Madonna, the Great Mother, is not homophobic. She welcomes the diversity of sexual preferences that are also part of creation, human & more-than-human.
(We have now counted fifty four species of birds and mammals that have significant homosexual populations. The medieval notion that homosexuality is “against nature” has been dis-proven: A homosexual minority is very much part of nature.)
The Black Madonna calls us to Grieve. The Black Madonna is the sorrowful mother, the mother who WEEPS TEARS for the suffering in the universe, the suffering in the world, the brokenness of our very vulnerable hearts. She is WATER. She is EMOTION.
The Great Mother, knows & empathizes with us in our pain. She embraces us like a tender mother, for COMPASSION is her SPECIAL GIFT to the world.
Only by passing through grief can creativity burst forth anew. Grieving is an emptying, it is Making The Womb Open Again for New-Birth to happen.
A culture that would substitute addictions for grieving is a culture that has lost its soul & its womb. To grieve is to enter what John of the Cross in the sixteenth century called the “dark night of the soul.”
“God replied: ‘I wish always to be your physician, bringing healing anointment for all your wounds. If it is I who allow you to be wounded so badly, do you not believe that I will heal you most lovingly in the very same hour?”
What is it we learn in this darkness of soul & spirit? “From suffering I have learned this: That whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless he embrace the very same love which wounded her.”
The Black Madonna calls us to Celebrate & to Dance. While she weeps tears for the world, as the sorrowful mother, she does not wallow in her grief, she does not stay there forever. Rather, she is a joyful mother, a mother happy to have being & to have shared it with so many other creatures. She expects Joy in return. Celebration of life and its pleasures lie at the core of her existence."
Celebration is part of compassion. Celebration is the exercise of our common joy. Praise is the noise that joy makes. It is in favor of BIOPHILIA. She is a lover of life par excellence. She expects us, her children, to be the same.
