The Veil of the Black Madonna
“I am all that has been, that is, that shall be, and none among mortals has yet dared to raise my veil.” -sacred words carved onto the famous veiled statue of Isis of Sais.
There is no question that, as humans, we move through cycles of consciousness and unconsciousness. We may be part of the dance of divinity, even a uniquely designed vehicle for bridging the mysterious and the mundane, capable of reflecting the vast in a manner that is poetic in its blend of pristine intellectual appreciation and raw empathic ecstasy, and yet with humanness comes forgetting. Collectively, we have not yet been able to hold onto the consciousness and connection to the Mysterious that we are capable of touching, without distorting it, fearing it, attempting to control it, disowning it, or making it dangerous to acknowledge. And this, the knowledge and the power, the love and the magic, the enlivened mystery of the true dreaming consciousness of this earth, all that we forget and disavow, long for like an awaited miracle, this energy collects, waits, changes shape, stays close to us, and answers when we call. This has been my understanding of the Goddess, and I have been humbled and deeply nourished this Summer to come to know her in what is perhaps one of her most incredible, potent, and uncanny manifestations as the Black Madonna, the face through which the oldest and most potent mysteries of the Earth and the Divine Feminine remained active as a living mystery cult, even within the heart of the Catholic religion.
It isn’t entirely accurate to say that I wasn’t familiar with the Black Madonna. I, like many Mexican American and Latinx people, have felt reverence and awe for Señora Guadalupe, the aspect of Mary that appeared to the peasant Juan Diego, at the site of the temple that had once belonged to the Nahuatl Earth Mother Tonantzin. La Señora Guadalupe lovingly holds the hearts, dignity, and ancient wisdom of Mexican lineage people. Her skin is brown in reflection of the indigenous peoples. Her request for acknowledgment came to the most disempowered among colonial society, yet one with reverence in heart. Her miracles are for everyone who needs them. Her robe carries the stars in constellations of relevance to the ancient tradition. Her head is tilted at the same angle as the axis of the earth. The golden rays around her reflect the sacred number of the New Fire, heralding the knowledge of the Mexica culture around astrological collective change. Her image is entirely encoded with the ancient tradition. It was a beautiful, intentional act of resistance, preservation, guided by the divine intervention of a Goddess who was determined to stay close to and tend to her people. I just didn’t know that this was only one among many instances, in many different lands and in different ways, where this incredible act of love and magic happened. I didn’t know that the name for this broader phenomenon was The Black Madonna.
The Black Madonna cult is the living mystery tradition surrounding a number of statues and paintings representing the Mother Mary and the baby Jesus as black or brown, and the mystical folklore of uncanny origin stories and deeply healing miracles that surround their presence in chapels and mountain tops. They tend to have appeared originally either by a light emanating from the ground that led a person from the peasant or disempowered class, or a child or even first the animals to discover a land spot. After digging in this place, the icon is found, often having survived the destruction of an earlier church or temple. In some stories, it is an apparition of Mary who initiates the request for a church to be built with her image at a sacred site, as with Señora Guadalupe. The famous Knights Templar also had a part to play in the history, discovering and bringing to Europe images and statues of The Black Madonna, however in some stories storms and shipwrecks determined where these emanations of the Mother landed, each time involving a miracle that saved the people and the relic, while the ship was destroyed, making it impossible to travel further. There are many such images around the world, particularly in the areas of Italy, Spain, France, England, Poland, and into areas of the Caribbean, Latin America and Mexico. In each place, people come on their own and sometimes in large numbers to make prayers, receive miracles, to walk in procession with her image, to enact the oldest rites of that land and its Pagan traditions, to dance, sings, and even to re-enact the miracles they have received as an annual pledge of gratitude. The Mother responds by granting their prayers, changing her facial expression, and in some cases by bleeding or changing location. When people have attempted to move these statues and images from their original site, they have the mysterious habit of moving themselves back.
If you ask, within the church, the meaning of the blackness of these images, you may hear something like the ash or heat from years of burning candles has blackened them. Often this explanation is immediately undermined by the nuance of color that can be seen on the robes, lips, and eyes of the Madonna. I have read on inscriptions that she is black because of her sorrows for the world, and her relationship to human suffering. Some attribute the blackness to the material from which the statues are made. They are often basalt, which was actually the sacred material in which images of Isis were carved. Most of the statues are made of wood. Some speculate that the images are black because they reflect the African origins of human civilization, the original Mother of humanity. Some of the images have features, the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth, and general bone structure for example, that would support that and some do not. Many believe that they mirror the dark skin that would likely have been culturally appropriate for Mother Mary and Jesus, given the part of the world from which they came. And many more believe that they are images of Isis, the Goddess of 1,000 names, who is the one who changes her face and name to meet her children of all cultures, performs miracles of healing, resurrection, and magic. We do know that the image of the mother holding the divine child on her lap that became Mary and Jesus, was based on that of Isis and her son Horus. In reality, it may be that there is not one explanation alone. There may be truth in many of these theories, though I am personally less inclined to believe in the more dismissive idea that it is discoloring alone. Racism runs deep in our world, to the point that many of these images have been painted over to look more white, and others have been vandalized or stolen. In fact, this living mystery tradition may be in some danger of disappearing, as already many chapels have had to lock her image behind glass, bars, or highly limit public visitation. There is also evidence to suggest that there is a larger and more mysterious reason for the blackness of the Madonna. There is even one image of her that is simply a black egg with a veil, perhaps suggesting that she is the pregnant darkness from which all of life emerges.
What I find to be the most intriguing aspect of what the Black Madonnas have in common is their arrival and placement in places that are special power spots on the earth. They appear and request to be honored in places where the mountains meet the sea, places of high energy, elemental vibrations. These are places that more ancient cultures were likely to recognize and mark as well, with the remnants of older temples and ruins often nearby. Furthermore, the rites that are practiced in many of her locations, and in her honor, are very similar to the rites of the older Goddess traditions and Pagan cultures that held spiritual relevance for people for generations, before being banned and made dangerous by the rise of the Catholic church. In some places, like Italy and Sicily for example, these can even include the ecstatic in dance, drumming, and sexuality, as well as the embracing of all who are other and in between. The Black Madonna is also the patron and protector of those exiled, oppressed and excluded, often the poor, the indigenous, the cultures of color, the queer and gender non conforming. She holds the hands of all that was left out of Spirituality, in the wake of Catholicism and Imperialism.
Perhaps the Earth Mother, or even the oldest concepts of the Goddess as the fertile darkness of cosmic creation and the power of the earth combined, is the true origin of the Black Madonna. One of the prevailing theories of her blackness is that she is the black soil that is the most fertile ground for planting. I can’t hear that without hearing the dual meaning of fertile soil. In Nahuatl it is called Mactocuimanactan, and it also refers to the dark place of creation that exists in our deepest dreaming levels of mind, where true changes can be made and miracles manifest. It is a state we can access and use to dream our lives with more intention, a place before the conscious mind, time, and agreed upon definitions of reality. It is the place of deep magic and the awakened knowledge of what we are as bridges between the spiritual and the mundane. Astoundingly, for the depth of mysticism that this embodies, it is with a gentle, loving, and compassionate hand that we are guided towards this activation by the Black Madonna, like she is gently supporting us where we are now, while she asks us to remember who we have always been.
This is the medicine we found as we held our first Intuition Retreat to her sacred site in Mallorca, Spain, this year, and none of us were untouched by her grace and power. I can still see the large heart in the sky that formed as we held our circle and reached out to understand her mystery. I can see the streams of golden light that poured down from its center towards us. I can see the mountain that we faced when we meditated and called to her in ceremony, with her chapel just on the other side of the ridge. I can see the smile that formed on her statue’s face when I spoke to her and she answered, in the candlelit back room of the large Spanish Cathedral. I can feel the soft, cleansing waters of the Mediterranean Sea cleansing us, and the gentle winds that moved through and cooled us as we danced into the night communing with her ancient energies. I can feel the chill on my skin when we found the true earth temple beneath us in the form of an ancient cave that was like nothing I’ve ever seen, the shapes and majesty like an original blueprint for what the above ground Cathedrals would perhaps later model. I can still hear her voice saying “I have always been with you…I have always been with you……I have always been with you.”
It’s possible that the Black Madonna defies clear definition partly because she is meant to remain mysterious. She is Mary, Isis, Cybele, Diana, Hekate, Tonantzin, Yemaya, Kali, Demeter, Inanna, and also something beyond. Her truth may be in the act of veiling the ancient and mysterious, and in unveiling it for us, when our consciousness is ready. She is the egg of potential and power that has always been within the earth and exists within us too, waiting for the moment when we would be receptive, holding us with love and healing support until then. She is the great act of preservation, veiling tradition and power through the dark times of Inquisition, colonization, and war. She is the one who answers prayers in times of desperation, plague, victimization, and raw need. She is the veil lifting and the old knowledge returning from unconscious to conscious.
The other day I was watching the sunset through the trees at my house. The way the light moved through the branches and leaves created a kind of window, allowing the light to refract into colorful prisms of rainbow colors. Patterns emerged that looked geometric like mandalas, like stained glass. It was like seeing magic directly. It looked like stained glass. It occurred to me that someone must have seen this and designed stained glass to recall it. It reminded me of the high ceilings and narrow, ornate spires within the caves I visited the day after the retreat, and how much they looked like shapes built into the cathedral. What if the oldest cathedrals are underground and stained glass prisms of light are shining in the rays of the sun through the trees? What if we have unconsciously or consciously built these mirrors all around us to remind us? What if the unknown is encoded into the known and waiting for us to see it. What if our time is pushing us to unlock these old mysteries because it is not necessary to hide and wait anymore. What does this movement now ask of us? What is still sleeping within you and asking to be awoken? What are you meant to remember and reclaim so that you, so that each of us can grow into the people of the Sixth Sun, of the Age of Aquarius? Do you need to go on a retreat, a journey away from the familiar in order to see it? Do you only need to go outside and gaze at the amazing artistry of nature to perceive the codes of mystery embedded all around us? Do you just need a moment to get quiet enough? Do you need a healing miracle?
Perhaps begin by stepping outside into the rays of the sun, or moon. Ask for what you need to the Great Mother, as the Black Madonna, as Señora Guadalupe, as Mother Mary, or even perhaps as a different aspect of the Divine Feminine that most speaks to your heart.
She is the one who answers. She is the one who opens the path to the awakening of the mystery here on earth and within the heart.
Ometeotl.
May all the beauty that was ever lost, be found. May every gift of mystery and magic once supressed, be recovered.
With love,
the eleventh house