Lilith and the Black Madonna

‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’ : Old Testament, Psalms 118 vs 22.

Meister Eckhart: The ground of the soul is dark.

This past Saturday our small group of 4 women met for our ongoing study of the Black Madonna. Although we plan to meet every other Saturday afternoon it doesn’t always work out that way – some of us are not in town at that time or other reasons get in the way. Our last meeting was almost two months ago, so it was especially nice to re-meet and to get ‘back’ into the Black Madonna who we see as a form of Lilith. These meetings always leave us feeling a little more in tune with our own dark energies and hopefully a little more conscious of the role she plays in our every day lives.

I mentioned to the girls that I had woken in the early hours that morning and stood on my balcony looking out and saw two huge stars in the clear night sky. Margaret said that the new moon – a mere sliver – had risen that morning and that the two stars were Jupiter and Venus. We talked about the new, dark moon relating her to Lilith, meaning ‘night’. We spoke of how the moon is usually regarded as feminine energy and the sun as masculine energy. This is a bit simplistic of course, as each contains both Eros and Logos and each needs the other for wholeness.

Several blogs back (June 16) I wrote about the Black Madonna and more recently my blogs have been about Lilith. In this blog I want to connect Lilith and the Black Madonna and point out how they refer to the dark, earthy feminine within all of us – men and women.

Why a Black Madonna? A beautiful, regal, black woman holding the baby Christ in her arms? We are used to seeing a pale, beautiful, golden haired, sacred Mary with her baby. Why black? Is the pale Mary the official one, and the Black Madonna the unofficial one? And, if so, what does this mean.

Could she be calling us to our own darkness and depth? Could she offer the western world her wisdom in our maturing? Can darkness and depth be the deep unsolvable mystery of all mysteries? Have we been fleeing from the depths in our desperate desire to reach the heights? Is she offering gifts in the guise of challenges? Do we need her today? Is she cosmic? Do we see her as a black hole which would mean being swallowed up by her? Why are we afraid of the dark?

To whom is the Black Madonna also linked? What is her history? She is one of the great goddesses from millennia back. She has religious and psychological significance which gives her a firm grounding. She has been linked pre-patriarchally, to inter alia Isis, Kali, Medusa, Hecate, Innana and her handmaiden, Lilith. There are said to be over 400 Black Madonnas around the world, many of them up until now hidden and only recently discovered e.g. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico; The Black Madonna in Einsiedeln in Switzerland; Our Lady of Czestochowa in Jasna Gora, Poland to mention but very few.

It is no secret that women have been regarded as 2nd class citizens throughout the ages. They have been seen as subversive in male dominated theology. St. Augustine (354-430 AD) wrote inter alia of women: “…in the faeces and urine of childbirth, the closeness of women to all that is vile, corruptible … in the curse of menstruation, she lay closer to the beasts; the lure of her beauty was nothing but an aspect of the death brought about by her seduction of Adam in the garden”. He also wrote that women have no souls. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the time of the witch-hunts, more than a million women were subjected to vaginal and rectal searches and were either hanged or burned at the stake. From this time onwards and soon after the Black Plague that decimated much of Europe, the Virgin Mother became the Universal Mother as patriarchy began to seek for a more stable source of security. But, she was seen as ‘chaste’ and obedient. This perception of the Goddess meant unfortunately, that the more lustful and sensual goddess was driven underground into unconsciousness, into exile, to the detriment of both men and women.

Patriarchy has been inclined to see women as submissive, good only for child bearing and in modern parlance, barefoot and tied to the kitchen sink and even today as man’s ‘property’. The ego-consciousness of patriarchy devalued the life-death-rebirth, instinctual values of women. Men took a stand against women for fear of falling prey to their wiles and seductive powers.

The feminine principle stands for all that is life giving as well as life destroying, paradoxical though that may seem. It stands for chaos from which order emerges in a new transformative, transcendent form. It is both joyful and grieving. It is dark and fecund, like the soil of the earth. It embraces ALL in life, and in death. Pain and suffering, sorrow, grief, anger, destruction, wildness, non-conformity, death and darkness are all embraced by the Black Madonna. So too does she embrace compassion, joy, creativity, light, playfulness, mothering, nurturing, birthing, ugliness and beauty. She devours and she transforms. Nothing is meaningless to her. She knows that ALL is part of the whole of life and death. Wanting only the light and the good and the heights is an awful denial of the depths and is overly one-sided and fixed leaving little or no room for manoeuvre.

This is not a call for a re-emergence of the matriarchal archetype over the patriarchal archetype but for an integration of the two. This feminine dark energy has been neglected and it is necessary to bring this energy out the shadows and for us to recognize that she speaks to us in a way that appeases our hungering souls. If these two complementary archetypes could be brought into play with each other, each recognizing the value of the other, we would be on the way to being more psychologically whole as we become more aware and awakened on a personal and collective level.

Both men and women have suffered because of the repression of the feminine principle. Oddly enough, this served for the arising of ego-consciousness as masculine values of perception, behaviour and feeling came to be of supreme value. But I may write about this another time. Bringing the feminine back into our lives will be a bringing back of the cornerstone that was rejected.

As I am writing this, I have just had a call from the Greek Embassy to say that I must not fetch my passport this Thursday as it is a Greek public holiday. My passport is in for a visa application to Crete next month. I asked her what the holiday is for and she said they are celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary. I said to her how extraordinary this is as I am in the throes of writing about Madonna, specifically the Black Madonna. Personally, I am in awe of this sort of synchronicity and said as much to her.

As usual, I feel I have bitten off more than I can chew in writing about the Black Madonna. I will write more on her in good time. But I hope that the links between her and Lilith can be seen and how whatever has been relegated into unconsciousness, WILL re-emerge in its drive for expression.