GAIA - Beautiful Video from 2010

https://youtu.be/nGeXdv-uPaw

Poetry for a Winter Solstice

luminaria on Serpent Mound in Ohio

 

You, Darkness

 

You, darkness, that I come from

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything –

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them! –

powers and people –

and it is possible 

a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

December Moon

 

Before going to bed

After a fall of snow

I look out on the field

Shining there in the moonlight

So calm, untouched and white

Snow silence fills my head

After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn

When I look down again

The whole landscape has changed

The perfect surface gone

Criss-crossed and written on

Where the wild creatures ranged

While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?

Why did I hear no sound

There on the snow-locked ground

In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go

When the December moon is bright,

What worlds of play we'll never know

Sleeping away the cold white night

After a fall of snow.

 

May Sarton

Pledge of Allegiance

 

I pledge allegiance to the soil

      of Turtle Island,

and to the beings who thereon dwell

      one ecosystem

      in diversity

      under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all.

 

Gary Snyder

Why We Need the Dark - Solstice Reflections

 

"We’ve rolled back the night so far that soon we will come full circle and reach the dawn of the following day. And where will that leave us? In a world with no God and no wolf either — only unrelenting commerce and consumption, information and media ... and light. We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us."

A post from 2017 I felt like revisiting - as always, my thoughts, particularly at this time of year, turn to "Endarkenment" as the Balance and partner of "Enlightenment".  :

I remember a winter night many years ago, when I lived in the country in upstate N.Y..   I shared a house with a second story living room that had a big picture window,  A  mid-winter snowstorm had left us stranded in a shimmering blanket of snow.  One could look out on that field of white, illuminated by the dark sky, the moon, and an occasional star,  into a vast,  dark silence.   For a while the lights went out, but we had no shortage of candles, and somehow that makes the memory even sweeter for me.  The intensity of the dark and the silence the snow that long ago December was not frightening, but intimate,  a landscape for sleep, for the incubation of dreams, a place to heal from the frenzy of achievement and obligation, a darkness ripe with dormant life.  A place where we could lie together in the warmth of our bed, becoming aware of  the occasional sound of snowfall, or an animal moving outside.  

I remember recently seeing a time lapse film of cities - vast networks of light, sky scrapers and traffic rushing along freeways like blood coursing along arteries, and I was struck by how much it looked like some kind of organism frenetically pulsing and extruding itself and consuming everything around it.  The truth is, it had a terrible beauty - the shimmering, glittering urban  triumph of humanity over nature, over the darkness.  Or is it truly "triumph"?  How is it possible we have so forgotten that we are not the conquerors of nature, but part of nature?  Have we failed to see, in our blinding pursuit of speed and of "illumination" that we are also animals, participating in the cycles and seasons of the life of Gaia, needing rest, incubation, renewal, and the sweet silence of the dark.

Newgrange at the Winter Solstice

In the years since, I have so often thought of those winter nights. 

I  take the liberty of reprinting here a wonderful article by Clark Strand, whose book is well worth reading.  He has had such nights too, of that I'm sure. 

Bring On the Dark:  Why We Need the Winter Solstice

By CLARK STRAND
December 19, 2014

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — WHEN the people of this small mountain town got their first dose of electrical lighting in late 1924, they were appalled. “Old people swore that reading or living by so fierce a light was impossible,” wrote the local historian Alf Evers. That much light invited comparisons. It was an advertisement for the new, the rich and the beautiful — a verdict against the old, the ordinary and the poor. As Christmas approached, a protest was staged on the village green to decry the evils of modern light.

Woodstock has always been a small place with a big mouth where cultural issues are concerned. But in this case the protest didn’t amount to much. Here as elsewhere in early 20th-century America, the reluctance to embrace brighter nights was a brief and halfhearted affair.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. But few of us will turn off the lights long enough to notice. There’s no getting away from the light. There are fluorescent lights and halogen lights, stadium lights, streetlights, stoplights, headlights and billboard lights. There are night lights to stand sentinel in hallways, and the lit screens of cellphones to feed our addiction to information, even in the middle of the night. No wonder we have trouble sleeping. The lights are always on.

In the modern world, petroleum may drive our engines but our consciousness is driven by light. And what it drives us to is excess, in every imaginable form.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the availability of cheap, effective lighting extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day — for work, for entertainment, for discovery, for consumption; for every activity except sleep, that nightly act of renunciation. Darkness was the only power that has ever put the human agenda on hold.

In centuries past, the hours of darkness were a time when no productive work could be done. Which is to say, at night the human impulse to remake the world in our own image — so that it served us, so that we could almost believe the world and its resources existed for us alone — was suspended. The night was the natural corrective to that most persistent of all illusions: that human progress is the reason for the world.

Advances in science, industry, medicine and nearly every other area of human enterprise resulted from the influx of light. The only casualty was darkness, a thing of seemingly little value. But that was only because we had forgotten what darkness was for. In times past people took to their beds at nightfall, but not merely to sleep. They touched one another, told stories and, with so much night to work with, woke in the middle of it to a darkness so luxurious it teased visions from the mind and divine visitations that helped to guide their course through life. Now that deeper darkness has turned against us. The hour of the wolf we call it — that predatory insomnia that makes billions for big pharma. It was once the hour of God.

There is, of course, no need to fear the dark, much less prevail over it. Not that we could. Look up in the sky on a starry night, if you can still find one, and you will see that there is a lot of darkness in the universe. There is so much of it, in fact, that it simply has to be the foundation of all that is. The stars are an anomaly in the face of it, the planets an accident. Is it evil or indifferent? I don’t think so. Our lives begin in the womb and end in the tomb. It’s dark on either side.

We’ve rolled back the night so far that soon we will come full circle and reach the dawn of the following day. And where will that leave us? In a world with no God and no wolf either — only unrelenting commerce and consumption, information and media ... and light. We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us. And the earth, too, needs that rest. The only thing I can hope for is that, if we won’t come to our senses and search for the darkness, on nights like these, the darkness will come looking for us.

New Works.......Elemental Touch, The River, and Shaman Masks

Looks like it was a good idea to take my own advice (in the previous Interview post) , having been avoiding the studio for months and feeling the Holiday Blues as the days are short and dark.  I went into the studio, forced myself to work, and low and behold, FLOW has kicked back in and I am full of ideas once more.  

I started casting hands back in 2007 when I had an Alden B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood University in Michigan, and with ceramic artist Kathy Space we created a community arts project based on  the legend of the Spider Woman that I called "Spider Woman's Hands" which was shown at the Midland Arts Center.  Each participant made an Icon that was composed of a cast of their hand or hands, something significant to them as a personal symbol, and the entire exhibit of "Icons" was united by a "thread" that was held in each hand and extended to the next.  At last the Thread went right out the door, to represent our connection to all others and all life.   The Creative Spirit Center in Midland Michigan went on to repeat the Project, with Kathy Space and Space Studio. In 2009 I was Resident Artist at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C., and continued casting hands and pursuing "Spider Woman's Hands" with the community there with a sculpture called "Weavers".

                                 

I've been creating sculptures with casts of peoples hands ever since. Many of them seem to be rooted, another metaphor that repeats for me.   Here's an article I wrote back in 2009 about hands, and the "Hand and Eye" which fascinates me.  I guess  I would say that hands are as individual as faces, they age like the rings of a tree, and are full of the stories of what those hands have created and touched.  We touch the world, we "handle" the world, we create and caress and are active participants with World with our hands.  Hands go beyond the abstractions of the mind, abstractions that often remove us from the sensuous and the actual experience of being alive.   And hands can also represent the active and creative force in nature and in the cosmos - the "Hand of the Divine".                                

This is for a friend who is recently divorced, after a long and somewhat abusive marriage.  The butterflies represent the transformation she is now making in her life, the new life she is creating for herself.

Four Shaman Masks: 
 The Oracle (East), The Healer (West) The Maker (South)
 "Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (Center)

This  Series began with finding a drawing for the mask below, with the title, in a very old sketchbook, and feeling like, after some 20 years, it was time to make the mask.   Then the other masks followed, and I began to realize that they were related to the elements.  The last mask for North I have not made yet.  They need story, and I wish the right people would show up who can do just that, who will "activate" them. 

Surely, they must have been made for someone..................

"Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2020)

Interview with Shoutout Arizona

 A recent short interview with SHOUT OUT ARIZONA - pleased they gave me the opportunity!

                                             https://shoutoutarizona.com/meet-lauren-raine-artist/

LOCAL STORIES

Meet Lauren Raine: Artist

November 30, 2020 

Why did you pursue a creative career?

I don’t think I had any real choice in the question of why I became an artist. Ever since I was a child I just made art, and I saw no reason to give it up when I became (in theory) an adult. A reporter asked Picasso, at 90, what he considered his greatest work. His response? “The next one!”

Being an artist was my “real job”, and I supported it in whatever ways I could. I could say quite a few things about what I think creativity is, but ultimately I suggest that some people have an innate passion for self-expression in the arts, and will never really find fulfillment unless they follow that path. Which often, but not always, means making sacrifices of time or income, as well as having to look “outside the social/cultural box” to find creative integrity. It’s nice if one is fortunate enough to make money along the way, but that cannot be the definition of success. 

The writer Ursula Leguin wrote that our world needs what she called “realists of a larger reality”. “the name of the beautiful reward”, she said, “is not profit. Its name is freedom.” I believe it’s vital for artists to remember that we are myth makers, “pollinators of the imagination”. Throughout history, artists of all kinds have possessed the imaginal tools to invent and re-invent the myths that were the cultural underpinnings for their time. That is the career, the profession.

From that perspective, one might ask: “what are the new stories arising that can help us to evolve into a wiser, sustainable world? What injustices need to be addressed, what visions call for expression?” And further, how can they be brought fully alive in ways that have vitality and impact? I am here suggesting that artists consider viewing themselves as engaged in a sacred profession.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?

Too many questions to answer at once! But I suppose they all weave together into a tapestry. I can’t say what part of my work I’m most proud of, because it all reflects my story, just different ways of saying it. From the perspective now of being in my 70’s, I see that it is the same essential vision, story. I am rather proud of that – to discover that there was always something there that I kept trying to speak of. 

Art is a conversation, after all – collectively, and personally. I seem to have jumped around a lot, from sculpture to masks and ritual theatre to painting to…………….whatever seems to be the best medium of expression at the time. Different “languages”. I guess I could say that my art-making is my spiritual practice, whether it is done with others (as in theatre and ritual) or alone in my studio.

Certainly one of my most rewarding projects was the 20 year “Masks of the Goddess Project” which I concluded in 2019 with a show and performances at Arise Gallery in San Francisco. It began in 1998 when I went to Bali to study temple mask traditions. I was fortunate to produce collaborative masks with Balinese mask makers while there. Inspired by their sacred mask traditions I created a Collection of 35 masks based upon female deities and mythologies from around the world, which I dedicated as “Temple Masks” devoted to the multi-cultural Goddess. As the masks were used by dancers, storytellers, ritualists, communities and individuals, I found myself in a grand conversation, and the masks themselves gained energy, story, and creativity from those who used them. They travelled around the U.S. and even to the U.K. for 20 years, including the Parliament of World Religions, and include an archive and book about the many performances and reflections of participants in the Project.

Currently I’m working on a series of mosaic/sculptures I call “Our Lady of the Shards”, which are loosely inspired by Catholic Icons. They celebrate and remember those that have been forgotten, buried, and broken, now surfacing again to a world that needs them. Titles include “The Memory Keeper”, “The Weaver”, and “Shrine for the Forgotten Midwives”.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?

Well, I would suggest Crave Coffee Shop, and Fronimo’s Greek Restaurant! My favorite places to hang out. And of course, the Botanical Garden, and a hike through Sabino Canyon.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Having worked collectively with others in community art projects, too many to name! Ok, just a few: the writer Ursula Leguin, the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, and the The Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion

Website: www.laurenraine.com
Other: Blog: www.threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com 

Project: www.masksofthegoddess.com 

Articles: https://independent.academia.edu/laurenraine

The Black Madonna and Pilgrimage to the Source

"Our Lady of the Shards" Lauren Raine 2012

 

¨Visual images of the Goddesses stand in stark contrast to the image of God as an old white man, jarring us to question our culture's view that all legitimate power is male and that female power is dangerous and evil. The image of the naked Eve brazenly taking the apple from the serpent, then cowering in shame before a wrathful male God, tells us not only that female will is the source of all the evil in the universe, but also that the naked female body is part of the problem. This image communicates to the deep mind the message that female will and female nakedness must be controlled and punished by male authority. In contrast, the Goddesses show us that the female can be symbolic of all that is creative and powerful in the universe. The simplest and most profound meaning of the image of the Goddess is the legitimacy and goodness of female power, the female body, and female will.¨

 -Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess

 Black Madonna of Einsiedeln

The mysterious, ancient, and ubiquitous   "Black Madonnas",  both paintings and effigies,  are found in shrines, churches and cathedrals all over Europe - France alone has over 300. They are also found in other parts of the world as well, notably Mexico and South America.  For a map of Black Madonnas throughout the world  visit:

 http://interfaithmary.net/locations  

These icons have been the focus of pilgrimages since the early days of the church, and most certainly are found in  sites that were earlier pre-Christian  pilgrimage sites, such as sacred springs or caves,  as well as often  being  sites of former Roman temples.  

"Black Madonna"
Lauren Raine(2005)

Why were these effigies so beloved that pilgrims travelled many miles to seek healing, offer their devotions,  and perhaps hope for oracular  guidance? Why, in Medievil times when European peasants were unlikely to ever  see a dark skinned person,  was the Madonna black? Some of the statues are made of materials that are true ebony black.   And why are there so many myths that connect the Madonnnas  with springs, or caves, or special wells?

In 2005, during a residency on the 150 acres of I Park Artists Enclave, the land spoke to me, and I had time and space to speak back, to engage in a creative artistic  conversation.  One of my first "Black Madonna" sculptures  arose from that numinous time - eventually She found a home in a tree, and if she has since disintegrated into that tree through the passage of the seasons, well, that is appropriate.

Many scholars believe that the origins of the archetypal  Madonna with Child in Europe began with earlier pagan  images of Isis with her child Horus (the reborn Sun God). Isis was a significant religious figure in the later days of Rome, and continued to be worshipped in the early days of Christianity.  Imported from Egypt, Isis had shrines throughout the Roman Empire.  Rome was home to many deities, the cosmopolitan city of its time, and worshippers of  Isis, as well as the Christ of early Christianity, co-existed.   When Isis arrived in Rome she was sometimes  adapted to Rome with  Roman dress and complexion, and she was also occasionally merged with other Roman deities, such as Venus.  Images of Isis survived the fall of Rome,  were ubiquitous throughout the Roman Empire,  and temples devoted to Isis continued well into the third century AD. "Paris" probably derives from the name of Isis (par Isis)......."city of Isis"

fresco from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii

The Camino

Nevertheless, the origins of Isis  are Egypt, where she was represented as a dark skinned deity, as were the people of that land, and no doubt many of  her images transplanted to Rome and beyond retained the  coloring  of the peoples of Egypt.  But many believe (as do I) that  there are other associations that account for the archetype of the  Black Madonna and Her enduring devotion.  She represents the  Earth Mother,  and Her black color is the color of the rich, dark, fertile soil whose Mysteries sustain the cycles of life.

An image that especially interests me, for example, is one of two (!) Black Madonnas found at the shrine of Le Puy, France, which is one of the beginning points for the great Camino Pilgrimage.* In the Le Puy  Madonna  the Christ child emerges from the area of the figure's womb, rather

than being held in her arms.  Pilgrims  gather in the church  and pray to the Black Madonna at the start of their journey to the great Cathedral of Compestela.  Christians of the Middle Ages approached the Camino de Santiago de Compostela  as an act of transformation, an opportunity to make a long contemplative journey toward a divinely inspired life.  The Pilgrimage routes themselves have very  ancient,  pre-Christian origins associated with them,  which like Pilgrimages (called Mysteries) in ancient Greece  concerned  healing and rebirth, and like the Elusinian  Mysteries, were in some way associated with the Great Mother-Triple Goddess. 

Camino pilgrimage routes 

Pilgrimages to the Black Madonna still occur throughout Europe following long traditions -a  prolific annual pilgrimage, for example,  to the Black Madonna of Czestohowa in Poland engages thousands of worshippers, and there have been many claims of miracles that were granted by the pilgrimage.   

Procession before Mass. Photo: PAP/Marcin Kmieciński.

As previously noted, there are quite a few  Black Madonna shrines  associated with the great pilgrim route of Camino de Santiago de Compostela, called "the Camino".  When Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of Rome, he also gave the Imperial blessing to the Roman "Camino"  which he re-established as a Christian pilgrimage.  Santiago Means "Saint James".  According to legend,  St. James brought Christianity to Spain, where, in his travels, the Virgin appeared to him in a vision.  When he later returned to Palestine he was martyred, but  his disciples returned his body to Spain and interred it in what became the  great Cathedral and the  final destination of the pilgrimage.  But whether Saint James is actually buried at Compostela or not,  long before the Virgin was called the Virgin people were making pilgrimages on that route to the Mother Goddess - perhaps bearing offerings, at Roman shrines, to Isis.

Black Madonna of Czestochowskad (Poland)

Isis and her husband Osiris were the deities of agriculture,  and Isis was responsible for bringing the dead Osiris back to life, resulting in the birth of Horus, God of the Sun ( and associted with the Solstices).  As a fertility as well as mother Goddess, she was thus a Goddess of both the living and the dead, containing within Her the cycles of earthly existence - life, death, and rebirth.   Egyptian statues of Isis nursing the infant Horus are important as the probable origins of the Madonna and Child images, embodying the Great Mother Goddess archetype with prehistoric origins  ghosting all the way back to the Neolithic.   

Since some of the shrines dedicated to the Black Madonna occur in caves or at special springs  of geomagnetic potency she was associated with healing, and the dark earth that the common people depended upon and lived with  intimately.  Within the dark dormancy of winter, fertile seeds wait underground  in the black soil to germinate, bringing the renewal  of life.  In this sense, blackness and darkness  represent fertility, as well as the endarkened  underground realms of rebirth.  

In very ancient times, I personally  believe,  the magnificent Cave paintings, such as those in the Chauvet Cave which was made into a 2010 Documentary, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" by Werner Herzog,  were created in the darkness of caves as symbolic offerings within the great "womb" of the Mother Goddess.  One of the older drawings, far in the back of the cave, is that of a woman's vulva, the only representation of a human form within the cave, and indeed, it may be the earliest known drawing of a human.  It is generally called a "Venus" by archeologists, but I doubt it is there as a figure of male eroticism.  A more likely explanation is that it represents the source of birth - the Great Mother.  In that light the paintings of animals are acts of prayer,  honoring their  rebirth  within the "womb" of the cave.

Vulva form from Chauvet cave, ca. 30,000 bc. 
The bull and lion forms were apparently added at a later date.

Mother Earth 

Whether originally derived from Isis or not,  Black Madonna  images are connected in place and myth to healing springs, power sites, and holy caves.    The Black Madonna is thus a manifestation of the primal Earth Mother, transformed once more, this time  into the form of Catholic Mary.  But  She is not entirely disguised, because She is black like the rich Earth is black - fertile like the Earth is fertile, and dark because she is embodied and immanent, as nature is embodied and immanent. 

There are many sacred sites housing Black Madonna effigies, and quite a few of them are associated with "The Camino", of which the  Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella is the endpoint.   Scholar and film maker Jay Weidner has suggested that the earliest pilgrimages on the Camino were made to the Black Madonna of Compostella.  He points out that Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost", which is the fertile soil derived from the decomposition (and re-creation) of rotting organic matter, the "Dark Matter"  from which new life emerges.  Composting could be viewed as the alchemical soup to which everything returns, continually resurrected by nature into new life, new form.  "Mater" is Latin for Mother.

"From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostella they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened."  ~~ Jay Weidner

There are many miraculous legends associated with Black Madonna icons and sacred sites. The power of sacred sites and sacred images has multiple layers of potency.  What inner significance does the image have to the devout who come before it?  What does the icon, as well as the "spirit of place" emanate?  Can an ancient statue or painting have healing powers, or is the site itself a "place of power", it's energies renewed by millenia of geomantic reciprocity,  of millenia of devotion and pilgrimage? What is the power of place, pilgrimage and symbol combined to change consciousness and to effect the miraculous?  The extent to which pilgrimages to such sites are made is quite amazing - the Black Madonna of Montserrat in Spain receives as many as a million pilgrims a year who make pilgrimage to the the "miracle working Madonna" called La Moreneta, the little dark one.    

Here's a commentary by Martin Gray, who documented his 20 year worldwide pilgrimage to sacred sites in his magnificent book, illustrated throughout with his photography,  Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power. He is writing about the Black Madonna of Guadalupe, Spain, the object of a thousand years of  pilgrimages.

"It is important to consider the legendary description of the icon as having miraculous healing powers. How are these powers to be explained?

 The current author theorizes that the healing powers of certain icons, statues and images derive in part from their capacity to somehow function as both receptacles and conduits for some manner of spiritual or healing energy..........Perhaps, in some currently unexplained manner, sacred sites and sacred objects are able to gather, store, concentrate and radiate energy in a similar way."

And, to turn to an entirely different part of the world, yet perhaps not unrelated, I would like to mention briefly the great Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and the Black Stone of Mecca  which is enclosed in a silver enclosure that very distinctly resembles a Yoni.  No one really knows what significance this stone, or site (which was a pilgrimage site in pre-Islamic times as well, and had a simple open air shrine in the shape of a cube, hence, the "Kaaba", or Cube, structure of the present day shrine) had to the ancient peoples who made pilgrimage there, except that there were ancient  traditions of honoring special stones there.  Allat  (Al-lat)  was  an ancient mother and fertility goddess of the pre-Islamic people people of  Mecca, although I also read that she was considered an underground goddess, which would perhaps identify her with the Earth Womb/Yoni and the significance of Blackness.

Her name (Al-lat) means literally "the Goddess".  Allah means "God, or Creator". This deity of  great antiquity is one of a trinity of desert goddesses, the "daughters of Allah" that are named in the Koran. The Moon was associated with her,  hence perhaps the stones enclosure in a yoni shape made of silver.   These female  deities would have  been prominent  in Mecca during Mohammed's lifetime.   It is interesting  to consider the Black Stone's  current housing, and also fascinating,  from a symbolic point of view, that millions of people annually circle a 4-sided building that houses an ancient black stone, which was probably originally identified with a Goddess, that is made of silver like the moon, and is shaped like a Yoni.  And which only men may now view.

Black stone of Mecca By Amerrycan Muslim

I have been touched and fascinated by the Black Madonna for many years, even though I am not Catholic. As I came to study the significance of these mysterious Icons, I came to understand the enduring meaning of pilgrimages from the dawn of human culture as the ancient "Journey to the Great Mother".  With the ascent of patriarchy (and the descent of the Goddess) the Great Mother became hidden, buried under folk traditions, origins lost or hidden or co-opted by an all male deity.  That primal pilgrimage to the Source may have been represented by the great prehistoric monument of Silbury Hill, or called Isis nursing the Sun God Horus, or Demeter/Persephone/Hecate at the Eleusinian Mysteries, or She may have become  Mary with Jesus.......but it never really ended.  It just transformed again.  

Resources:

Begg, Ean, The Cult of the Black Virgin (1985) 

Benko, Stephen, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (1993) 

Christ, Carol P.,  Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (1997)

Cruz, Joan Caroll , Miraculous Images of Our Lady (1993) 

Gray, Martin, Sacred Earth - Places of Peace and Power (2005)   Sacred Sites (www.sacredsites.com)

The World Map of Black Madonnas http://interfaithmary.net/locations

Weidner, Jay  (www.jayweidner.com) 

* (in 2014 my friend Zoe made the Pilgrimage, with marvelous photographs, and here is the Blog I created for it:  https://zoescamino.blogspot.com/2014/11/camino-thirty-three-final-farewell.html)

The Return of the Black Madonna by Matthew Fox

"The Black Madonna", Lauren Raine, 2018

I was thinking about what the  Black Madonna means to me so I've been doing my research.   To begin with, here is a wonderful 2011 article by Matthew Fox about the importance of the Black Madonna for our crucial time of change.  

The Return of the Black Madonna:

A Sign of Our Times or 

How the Black Madonna

Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century

 by Matthew Fox

Every archetype has its seasons. They come and go according to the deepest, often unconscious, needs of the psyche both personal and collective. Today the Black Madonna is returning.[1] She is coming, not going, and she is calling us to something new (and very ancient as well). The last time the Black Madonna played a major role in western culture and psyche was the twelfth century renaissance, a renaissance that the great historian M.D. Chenu said was the “only renaissance that worked in the West.” [2] It worked because it was grass roots. And from this renaissance was birthed the University, the Cathedral, the city itself. 

She brought with her a resacralization of culture and a vision that awakened the young. In short, it was the last time the goddess entered western culture in a major way. In this essay I want to address what the Black Madonna archetype awakens in us and why she is so important for the twenty-first century. But before I do that, I want to tell a personal story of my first encounter with the Black Madonna. That encounter occurred in the Spring of 1968 when I was a student in Paris and took a brief trip—my first—to Chartres Cathedral located about thirty five miles from Paris. 

While all of Chartres was an amazing eye-opener for me, its sense of cosmology and humor and human dignity and inclusion of all of life, I stood before the statue of the black Madonna and was quite mesmerized. “What is this? Who is this?” I asked myself. A French woman came by and I quizzed her about it. The answer was as follows. “Oh, this is a statue that turned black over the years because of the number of candles burning around it,” she declared.

I didn’t believe her. It made no sense. I looked carefully and saw no excessive candle power around the statue. The story is an old one, one of ignorance and of racism. Even the French, at their most central holy spot, have lost the meaning and the story of the Black Madonna. And racism has contributed to this neglect. The Black Madonna is found all over Europe—in Sicily, Spain, Switzerland, France, Poland, Chechoslavakia—as well as in Turkey and in Africa and in Asia as Tara in China and as Kali in India. She is also named by Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. (Sometimes called the “brown Madonna.”) What is she about and why is interest returning in her today? 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 and different cultural settings. What I want to explore is why she is re-emerging in our time and what powers she brings with her. 

Why do we need the Black Madonna today? I detect twelve gifts that the Black Madonna archetype brings to our time. They are more than gifts, they are challenges. She comes to shake us up which, as we shall see, is an ancient work of Isis, the Black Madonna.

1. The Black Madonna is Dark and calls us to the darkness.. Darkness is something we need to get used to again—the “Enlightenment” has deceived us into being afraid of the dark and distant from it. Light switches are illusory. They feed the notion that we can “master nature” (Descartes’ false promise) and overcome all darkness with a flick of our finger. Meister Eckhart observes that “the ground of the soul is dark.”[3] Thus to avoid the darkness is to live superficially, cut off from one’s ground, one’s depth. 

The Black Madonna invites us into the dark and therefore 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 and the truth lies. Andrew Harvey puts it this way: “The Black Madonna is the transcendent Kali-Mother, the black womb of light out of which all of the worlds are always arising and into which they fall, the presence behind all things, the darkness of love and the loving unknowing into which the child of the Mother goes when his or her illumination is perfect.” [4] She calls us to that darkness which is mystery itself. She encourages us to be at home there, in the presence of deep, black, unsolveable mystery. She is, in Harvey’s words, “the blackness of divine mystery, that mystery celebrated by the great Aphophatic mystics, such as Dionysisus Areopagite, who see the divine as forever unknowable, mysterious, beyond all our concepts, hidden from all our senses in a light so dazzling it registers on them as darkness.” [5] 

Eckhart calls God’s darkness a “super essential darkness, a mystery behind mystery, a mystery within mystery that no light has penetrated.”[6] To honor darkness is to honor the experience of people of color. [7] Its opposite is racism. The Black Madonna invites us to get over racial stereotypes and racial fears and projections and to go for the dark.

2. The Black Madonna calls us to cosmology, a sense of the whole of space and time. Because she is dark and leads us into the dark, the Black Madonna is also cosmic. She is the great cosmic Mother on whose lap all creation exists. The universe itself is embraced and mothered by her. She yanks us out of our anthropocentrism and back into a state of honoring all our relations. She ushers in an era of cosmology, of our relationship to the whole (“kosmos” means whole in Greek) instead of just parts, be they nation parts or ethnic parts or religious parts or private parts. She pulls us out of the Newtonian parts-based relation to self and the world—out of our tribalism—into a relationship to the whole again. Since we are indeed inheriting a new cosmology in our time, a new “Universe Story”, the timing of the Black Madonna’s return could not be more fortuituous. She brings a blessing of the new cosmology, a sense of the sacred, to the task of educating our species in a new universe story. [8]

3. The Black Madonna calls us down to honor our lower charkas. One of the most dangerous aspects of western culture is its constant flight upwards, its race to the upper charkas (Descartes: “truth is clear and distinct ideas”) and its flight from the lower charkas. The Black Madonna takes us down, down to the first charkas including our relationship to the whole (first chakra, as I have explained elsewhere is about picking up the vibrations for sounds from the whole cosmos), our sexuality (second chakra) and our anger and moral outrage (third chakra). European culture in the modern era especially has tried to flee from all these elements both in religion and in education. The Black Madonna will not tolerate such flights from the earth, flights from the depths. [9]

4. Because she honors the direction of down and the lower charkas that take us there, the Madonna honors the earth and represents ecology and environmental concerns. Mother Earth is named by her very presence. Mother Earth is dark and fecund and busy birthing. So is the Black Madonna. Andrew Harvey says: “The Black Madonna is also the Queen of Nature, the blesser and agent of all rich fertile transformations in external and inner nature, in the outside world and in the psyche.” [10] Mother Earth nurtures her children and feeds the world and 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 and 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 with her in the most nuanced of ways. 

The Black Madonna sees things in terms of the whole and 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 and 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. She is a conservationist, one who conserves beauty and health and diversity. Furthermore, if Thomas Berry is correct that “ecology is functional cosmology,” then to be called to cosmology is to be called to its local expression of ecology. One cannot love the universe and not love the earth. And, vice versa, one cannot love the earth and ignore its temporal and spatial matrix, the universe.

5. The Black Madonna calls us to our depths, to living spiritually and radically on this planet and not superficially and unthinkingly and oblivious to the grace that has begotten us in so many ways. The depths to which we are called include the depths of awe, wonder and delight—joy itself is a depth experience we need to re-entertain in the name of the Black Madonna. She calls us to enter into the depths of our pain, suffering and shared grief—not to run from it or cover it up with a myriad of addictions ranging from shopping to drugs and alcohol and sport and superficial religion. 

She calls us to the depths of our creativity and 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 and eco justice and the struggle that must be maintained to carry on solidarity with the oppressed of any kind. She calls us to the depths of our psyche which, as Meister Eckhart says, are “dark” and to the depths of the earth, which are surely dark and to the depths of the sky that have also been rediscovered for all their darkness. Black holes abound in space as well as in the mysterious breadth of our souls. We need to explore them. They too are fecund. They have much to teach us.

6. The Black Madonna calls us to our Divinity which is also our Creativity. First, our Divinity. Because she is a goddess, the Black Madonna resides in all beings. She is the divine presence inside of creation. She calls us inside, into the “kingdom/queendom of God” where we can co-create with Divinity and 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. If Carl Jung is correct when he says that creativity comes “from the realm of the mothers” then the Black Madonna, who is surely a realm of the mothers, calls us to creativity. She expects nothing less from us than creativity.

Hers is a call to create, a call to ignite the imagination. What but our collective imaginations can succeed in moving us beyond our energy dependence on fossil fuels to an era of self-sustaining energy based on solar and renewable, clean fuels? What but an education in creativity can reinvent learning so that the joy and wonder and enticement of learning displaces our failing and boring educational systems? What but moral imagination can move us beyond the growing divide between materially impoverished nations and materially sated but spiritually impoverished nations? The Black Madonna would usher in an era where more and more artists will get good work and thrive on good work and reawaken the human soul by way of moral and political imagination. [11]

7. The Black Madonna calls us to Diversity. There is no imagination without diversity—imagination is about inviting disparate elements into soul and culture so that new combinations can make love together and new beings can be birthed. Because the Black Madonna is black, she addresses the fundamental phobia around race and differences of color and culture that come with race and ethnic diversity. Meister Eckhart says: “All the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” [12] 

To give God the name “Black Madonna” is to honor blackness and all people of color and to get over an excessive whiteness of soul and culture. It is also to honor the feminine. Divinity is diverse. Diverse in color and diverse in traditions and diverse in gender. 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 and 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 disproven: A homosexual minority is very much part of nature.) John Boswell, in his ground-breaking scholarly work entitled Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality has demonstrated that the twelfth century, that century that birthed the great renaissance and the Black Madonna in France, rejected homophobia. For a period of 125 years—years that were the most creative years in western civilization—diversity was welcomed at all levels of society. [13] Creativity thrives on diversity.

8. 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. In the Christian tradition she holds the dying Christ in her lap but this Christ represents all beings—it is the cosmic Christ and not just the historical Jesus that she is embracing, for all beings suffer and the Black Madonna, the Great Mother, knows this and empathizes with us in our pain. She embraces us like a tender mother, for compassion is her special gift to the world. She invites us to enter into our grief and name it and be there to learn what suffering has to teach us.

"Black Madonna" Lauren Raine 2005

Creativity cannot happen, birthing cannot happen, unless the grieving heart is paid attention to. 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 and its womb.

It will birth nothing but more pain and abuse and misuse of resources. It will be a place where waste reigns and where Divinity itself wastes away unused in the hearts and imaginations of the people. Andrew Harvey writes of how the Black Madonna provides “an immense force of protection, an immense alchemical power of transformation through both grief and joy, and an immense inspiration to compassionate service and action in the world.” She is also “queen of hell,” or “queen of the underworld,…that force of pure               suffering mystical love that annihilates evil at its root and engenders the Christ-child in the ground of the soul even as the world burns.” [14]

She holds both creative and destructive aspects within her. To grieve is to enter what John of the Cross in the sixteenth century called the “dark night of the soul.” We are instructed not to run from this dark night but to stay there to learn what darkness has to teach us. The Dark Madonna does not run from the darkness of spirit and soul that sometimes encompasses us. She invites us not to flee from pain and suffering.

Mechtild of Magdeburg in the thirteenth century wrote of this darkness in the following manner: “There comes a time when both body and soul enter into such a vast darkness that one loses light and consciousness and knows nothing more of God’s intimacy. At such a time when the light in the lantern burns out the beauty of the lantern can no longer be seen. With longing and distress we are reminded of our nothingness….I am hunted, captured, bound, wounded so terribly that I can never be healed. God has wounded be close unto death.” [15] Mechtild does not run from the darkness but stays and learns. “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?” [16]

What is it we learn in this darkness of soul and 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.” [17]

9.The Black Madonna calls us to Celebrate and to Dance. The Black Madonna, while she weeps tears for the world, as the sorrowful mother, does not wallow in her grief, does not stay there forever. Rather, she is a joyful mother, a mother happy to have being and 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 reason for being. She expects us to take joy in her many pleasures, joy in her fruits. Sophia or Wisdom in the Scriptures sings to this element of pleasure and eros, deep and passionate love of life and all its gifts.

I have exhaled a perfume like cinnamon and acacia, I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh…. Approach me, you who desire me, And take your fill of my fruits, For memories of me are sweeter than honey, Inheriting me is sweeter than the honeycomb. They who eat me will hunger for more, They who drink me will thirst for more. Whoever listens to me will never have to blush….(Eccl. 24.15, 19-22)

"Black Madonna" Lauren Raine, 2005

Celebration is part of compassion. As Meister Eckhart puts it: “What happens to another be it a joy or a sorrow happens to me.” Celebration is the exercise of our common joy. Praise is the noise that joy makes. Joy, praise and celebration are intrinsic to community and to the presence of the Black Madonna. She did not birth her Divine Child by whatever name in vain. She opts in favor of children, in favor of life, in favor of eros and in favor of biophilia. She is a lover of life par excellence. She expects us, her children, to be the same.

10. The Black Madonna calls us to our Divinity which is Compassion. Compassion is the best of which our species is capable. It is also the secret name for Divinity. There is no spiritual tradition East or West, North or South, that does not exist to instruct its people in how to be compassionate. “Maat” is the name for justice, harmony, balance and compassion among the African peoples. The Black Madonna calls us to Maat. To balance, harmony, justice and compassion. Grieving and Celebrating and Acting Justly are all parts of compassion. In both Arabic and Hebrew, the word for compassion comes from the word for “womb.” A Patriarchal period does not teach compassion, it ignores the womb-like energies of our world and our species. If it mentions compassion at all it trivializes it and renders it sissy. (For example, Webster’s dictionary declares that the idea that compassion is about a relationship among equals is “obsolete.”)

Patriarchy neglects what Meister Eckhart knew and taught: “Compassion means justice.” [18] Compassion has a hard side, it is not about sentiment but about relationships of justice and interdependence. Because the Black Madonna is the goddess that dwells deeply and darkly within all beings, ourselves included, she brings with her our capacity for compassion. We are not whole—we are not ourselves—until we partake in the carrying on of compassion. 

Meister Eckhart taught that the name of the human soul properly is “Compassion” and that until we are engaged in compassion we do not yet have soul. [19] Compassion knows when enough is enough; compassion does not overindulge; compassion does not hoard and does not run its life on addictions of insecurity and pyramid-building to overcome these addictions. Compassion trusts life and the universe ultimately to provide what is necessary for our being. But compassion works hard as a co-creator with the universe to see that a balance and basic fairness is achieved among beings.

Compassion is present in the Black Madonna in her very essence for “the first outburst of everything God (and Goddess) does is compassion.” (Eckhart) To return to compassion is to return to the Goddess. Cultural historian and feminist Henry Adams writes about the role of Mary at Chartres Cathedral in the twelfth century. “The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination—as you can see at Lourdes—was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law—justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil.” [20] Adams understood Mary as the Buddhist element in Christianity for with her as with Buddha, compassion is the first of all the virtues. “To Kwannon the Compassionate One and to Mary the Mother of God, compassion included the idea of sorrowful contemplation.” [21] Only the Great Mother could provide the compassion needed by the sorrowful human condition.

The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity, either separately or together, it must be in the Mother. If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race.[22]

She was beyond the law, a friend of the outlaws who appealed to the masses who “longed for a power above law—or above the contorted mass of ignorance and absurdity bearing the name of law.”[23] This power had to be more than human. It required the goddess. The Black Madonna, the goddess, provides the womb of the universe as the cosmic lap where all creatures gather. An ancient hymn dedicated to Isis underscores her cosmic role as sovereign over all of nature and queen of all the gods and goddesses:

I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below.[24]

How like a twelfth century poem to the Christian goddess Mary is this ancient hymn to Isis. Alan of Lille wrote the following poem about Nature in the twelfth century:
O child of God and Mother of things, Bond of the world, its firm-tied knot, Jewel set among things of earth, and mirror to all that passes away Morning star of our sphere; Peace, love, power, regimen and strength, Order, law, end, pathway, captain and source, Life, light, glory, beauty and shape, O Rule of our world! [25]

Interestingly, Alan of Lille speaks of the “Mother of things” as a “firm-tied knot” and the Thet which is an important symbol of Isis is also understood to be a knot.[26] We play in her cosmic lap, we bump up against one another there, and we work for balance, Maat, and justice there. The Black Madonna is the Throne of Compassion, the Divine lap. That is the meaning of the name “Isis” and Isis is the African goddess who gave us the Black Madonna both in Ephesus, Turkey and through Spain and Sicily directly into Western Europe. Indeed, certain passages of the Christian Gospels such as the birth narratives, which are clearly not historical but are stories of the Cosmic Christ, are passages taken from stories about Isis and her son, Horus. Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge, the late keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, writes:

The pictures and sculptures wherein she is represented in the act of suckling Horus formed the foundation for the Christian paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several of the incidents of the wanderings of the Virgin with the Child in Egypt as recorded in the Apochryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis…and many of the attributes of Isis, the God-mother, the mother of Horus…are identical with those of Mary the Mother of Christ.[27]

11. The Black Madonna Calls us to a renaissance of culture, religion and the city. Isis often wears a regal headdress that symbolizes her name as meaning “throne” or “queen.” Erich Neumann has written about Isis as “Throne.”

As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the ‘throne’ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also for the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the greatest Mother Goddess of the early cults was named Isis, the ‘seat,’ ‘the throne,’ the symbol of which she bears on her head; and the king who ‘takes possession’ of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on her in the literal sense of the word.[28]

The twelfth century renaissance was especially conscious of the role of “throne” and the goddess. In Latin the word for “throne” is “cathedra.” The medieval church gave birth to cathedrals—over 125 were built the size of Chartres—and every single one was dedicated to Mary with such titles as Notre Dame de Chartres, Notre Dame de Lyons, Notre Dame de Paris, etc. Over 375 other churches the size of these cathedrals were built dedicated to Mary also. In many of these cathedrals a statue to the Black Madonna can be found even to this day.

 A cathedral by definition meant the throne where the goddess sits ruling the universe with compassion and justice for the poor. Anthropocentrism, clericalism and sexism have co-opted the invention of cathedral to mean the “place where the bishop has his (usually his) throne.” This is false. The cathedral is designed to be the center of the city, it is bringing the goddess to the center of the city to bring the city alive with goddess energies and values. 

Cities were birthed in the twelfth century with the breakup of the land-based economy and religious and political system of the feudal era. The youth fled to the cities where religion reinvented itself apart from the monastic establishment that ruled for eight centuries and where education invented itself apart from the rural monastic educational system in the form of universities. Worship reinvented itself in the Cathedral in the city and apart from the monastic liturgical practice in the countryside. Today for the first time in human history more than 50% of humans are living in cities; By 2015, over two-thirds of humans—a great proportion of them young people—will be living in cities. 

The Black Madonna and the “throne as goddess” motif contribute to the resurrection of our cities. They give us a center, a cosmic center, a synthesis and unity and a life-energy by which we can redeem our cities and take them back from lifelessness and thanatos. Artists gather in a city. Celebration and ritual happen in a city. Nature and human nature congregate in a city. No wonder Meister Eckhart and other medieval mystics celebrated the human soul as city and the city as soul. It is the task of a renaissance to bring soul back to city. We might even define renaissance as a “rebirth of cities based on a spiritual initiative.”

12. The Black Madonna calls us to reinvent education and art. The goddess also ruled at the university—she was “Queen of the sciences” and “mistress of all the arts and sciences” who was “afraid of none of them, and did nothing, ever, to stunt any of them.”[29] All learning was to culminate in her. She was about wisdom not just knowledge. The renaissance that the Madonna represented was both religious and educational. Often the headdress of Isis depicts the full moon between curved horns and has the shape of the musical instrument that the Egyptians played in her honor called the sistrum. Plutarch stated that the purpose of the sistrum which is a kind of rattle was that “all things in existence need to be shaken, or rattled about…to be agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid.” [30]

The Black Madonna shakes things up. Is this not an archetype for our times? Is she not a forebearer of a renaissance, one who comes to give new birth to a civilization, a birth based on a new sense of spirituality and cosmology and learning—a learning that reawakens us to our place in the universe? How will work in the world become wise as opposed to exploitive without wisdom? How will the human soul move from knowledge to wisdom without the kind of effort the goddess can bring?

Without a balance of male/female, heart/head, body/spirit truly happening at all levels of education from childhood to professional degrees? How will a renaissance happen if education is left behind? What role will art play when the artist too lets go of the internalized oppression of the modern era and recommits himself/herself to serving the community and to serving the larger community of ecological sustainability? [31]

These are some of the questions raised by the return of the Black Madonna in our time. They beg for response. They beg for listening ears and attentive institutions. They beg for self criticism of nation-states, governments, corporations, academia, religion, law, professions of all kinds which are called to something new (and very ancient): a new relationship between earth and humans. One of mutuality, not mastering. One of joy and wonder, not boredom. One that honors all our relations. For this to come about some rattling of our modern cages and mindsets is in order. The Black Madonna provides such a shake-up. Still. After all these centuries.

http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-century

FOOTNOTES

[1] See, for example, China Galland, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (New York: Viking, 1990). [2] See M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), chapter one. [3] Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1982), 42. [4] Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother (Berkeley, Frog, Ltd. 1995), 371. [5] Ibid. [6] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 43. [7] See Eulalio R. Baltazar, The Dark Center: A Process Theology of Blackness (New York: Paulist, 1973). [8] See Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) and Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). [9] For a fuller development of the charkas see Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh (New York: Harmony, 1999), 94-116; 167-327. [10] Harvey, 371. [11] Cf. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991). [12] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 42. [13] John Boswell, Christianity, Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). [14] Harvey, The Return of the Mother, 372f. [15] Sue Woodruff, Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg (Sante Fe, Bear & Co., 1982), 60f., 64f. [16] Ibid., 68. [17] Ibid., 69. [18] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 103. [19] Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2000), 442. [20] R. P. Blackmur, Henry Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 203. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid., 204. [23] Ibid., 203. [24] Eloise McKinney-Johnson, “Egypt’s Isis: The Original Black Madonna” Journal of African Civilizations, April, 1984, 66. [25] Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, 19. [26] See McKinney-Johnson, 71. [27] Ibid., 67. [28] Ibid., 68. [29] Blackmur, Henry Adams, 206. [30] See McKinney-Johnson, 71. [31] See Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art.