My conscious intention for the trip was to see the very earliest female imagery dating back to the 'Ice Age. And I did. I explored some wonderful museums and archaeological sites. . . but some other force was at work.

I kept bumping into black and brown madonnas in the crypts and altars or very old churches. Inevitably, they were surrounded by many lit candles, more than around the statues of the white Mary or Jesus. I noted this phenomenon first at Chartres. While the tourists were wandering around admiring the beauty of the stained glass windows, dozens of other people were focused on a statue of a very black mother holding a very black child. I watched as people lit candles and left notes and kissed the pillar upon which she stood. It appeared to me that the spiritual pulse of the whole great cathedral was centered on this statue of a black mother.

French friends that I talked to had no idea why she was black and accepted it nonchalantly as one does with customs that have been around for a long time. This was my third trip to Chartres over a twenty five year period and the first time I had noticed her. In the past I'm sure I would have been embarrassed by her worship as one is embarrassed by the things of childhood that were once very precious and then were thrown aside at the gates of young adulthood. But now as a grown woman searching for traditions that were older than the androcentric ones surrounding me, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing: the devotions of the Catholic faithful were keeping alive a reverence for the mother that I suspected was much older than that to the Christian Mary.

From a book called The Cult of the Black Virgin, I learned there are two hundred or more active shrines to the black madonna in France. Most of them date back to the 11th and 12th century, some even earlier. They are all housed within Catholic churches and according to the author Ean Begg, the Church denies the significance of their darkness saying it is due to the soot of candle smoke over many years. His research, corroborated by a number of other books I have since read, reveals earlier pre-Christian goddess worship at almost all of the sites where black madonnas now exist.

Some Examples

In the great cathedral of Chartres, the black madonna statue I described above dates to the thirteenth century. A second madonna statue exists in the underground crypt next to an ancient and sacred well. The story is told that the Christian missionaries first coming to the area of Chartres found the indigenous peoples worshipping a statue of a woman giving birth. The missionaries concluded this was a "pre-figuration" of the Virgin Mary and that the people were already Christians — they just didn't know it. A sanctuary was built around the original mother statue. She continued as the center piece of each succeeding church including the present cathedral built in the 1100's. During the French revolution the statue was deliberately destroyed and in 1856 a dark wooden sculpture was created to replace it.

Further south in the medieval town of Le Puy there is a high and holy hill that served as a pre-Christian sacred sight.  The worship of the Virgin Mary occurred here at a very early date and it is said to be descended from a cult devoted to the Celtic Mother Goddess Cerridwen. A cathedral was built upon the holy hill and on the main altar there is a very black madonna and child statue. In the Middle Ages five popes and fifteen kings came to see her as did Joan of Arc's mother, walking all the way from the west of France to pray for her daughter's victory.

The original statue was burned by the French revolutionaries. In the place where the statue was destroyed, a local farmer found an oval red stone inscribed with hieroglyphs and an image of a woman standing in a boat wearing a headdress of a crescent moon. This is an ancient symbol of Isis and curiously, before the Christian era the worship of Isis was the most widespread religion in the Roman Empire extending from Spain to Asia Minor, from North Africa to Germany. Originally from Egypt, Isis was associated with the fertility of the black soil irrigated by the flooding of the river Nile. Her priests wore black and burned incense (as do Roman Catholic priests) and the most sacred of her images were made from black basalt.

Cybele was another great Mother Goddess whose cult was spread throughout the Roman Empire. From Asia Minor she was brought to Rome in the form of a black stone and by the third century BC, she had become the main deity of Lyons. Nearby in the city of Clermont-Fermont she was associated with a holy well. The well is now part of the crypt of a church called Notre Dame du Port. Next to the well is . . . a very black madonna sitting in a marble throne.

There are many goddesses associated with the black madonna shrines in France but the most common ones are Isis, Cybele and another dark skinned divinity named Artemis of Ephesus. Different from the huntress Artemis so popular in Greek mythology, the Artemis of Ephesus is portrayed with many breasts and in her native Ephesus (Turkey), her statue was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

So what is going on? Why was the image of a black female divinity so important in a white culture? Why has the image endured and continued to inspire devotion?

Who is the black madonna?

I returned to France a second and third time to search out the shrines to the black madonnas. I read through many books including the two French sources Ean Begg used to write The Cult of the Black Madonna. After a lot of thinking, the answer came through feeling, and the feeling was very deep and quite simple.

Each of us originated in the darkness of our mother's womb. And as a species, we all came out of Africa. We all were once dark skinned.

My twenty five years of work in holistic healthcare has made me a firm believer in body memories and cellular consciousness. On an individual — and I believe on a collective level — the body remembers the past. And the oldest memory is of darkness as the source and the beginning. The dark mother is the original mother.

This simple understanding has to be posited against the evolving institution of Christianity — and the distortions that occurred to the image of Mary. To begin with, the historic Mary was probably not white. Some of the first paintings of her are attributed to St Luke and they are all brown skinned. In all likelihood Mary was ethnically dark or browned by exposure to the sun, or both. Her "whitening" has to be seen in the context of male antipathy toward the body, particularly the female body. The early Church Fathers considered women to be unclean, contaminated and evil.

To justify her relationship to the son of God, the patriarchs split Mary from her human female flesh. Her body was like no other: Church dogma insisted that her conception was immaculate, that is, untainted by sexual intercourse. And she in turn conceived her son Jesus through a shaft of light sent by God. In another dogma, her body was taken up into Heaven at death so her flesh never rotted and decayed. In the mythology of the Catholic Church Mary in all ways remained pure.

The Church Fathers may have tried to split off spirit from matter but the need of the human psyche is to have wholeness and the dark mothers, who have existed since the beginning, arose as the holders of the life force that is female — and embodied — in a period of white European history that devalued women and nature. If the "foreign" dark skinned goddesses had never been introduced to Europe I suspect the black madonnas would still have appeared to balance the pure white Mary.

On my first trip to France, in the context of a goddess pilgrimage, I was "lead" out of the museums and into a dynamic and living worship of the black original mother. It was as if I was being guided to see a stream of consciousness that had been obscured for centuries at a time and was only now becoming visible as a clear and continuous flow. I would name that stream as mother wisdom and the truth that it has to tell is that the mother is the first principle in human consciousness. This is not to say that male is insignificant or inferior but simply what we know first is the mother. Sperm meets egg within the body of the mother. She grows us inside her until we are ready to be launched out into the world and still, for many years, we need her for sustenance and support. For reasons that I do not fully understand, this basic reality of human existence has been denied and demeaned for the last few thousand years by all the major Western world religions.

The Roman Catholic Church has been a major perpetrator of this denial and oddly or perhaps quite appropriately, it contains within itself hundreds of black madonna statues which embody the oldest truth on the planet, that is, that the miraculous and mysterious gift of life comes through the body of a woman and in the beginning that body was a black body.

These musings of mine were confirmed at the end of my last goddess pilgrimage to France. I had taken a "wrong" turn out of the mountains near the Spanish border and I found myself once again in the town of Limoux where Notre Dame de Marceille resided in a very old church on the top of a hill. She was an unusually young and beautiful dark skinned madonna statue. When I saw her for the fast time I knew in my gut that she was an important yet unknown piece of the puzzle I was assembling and for these reasons, I was not surprised to find myself again in the vicinity of her presence. When I entered the church an elderly woman was already kneeling in front of the statue. She left and I lit a candle, offering my deep heartfelt thanks for all the blessings I had received on the trip.

Just as I was about to drive away, a middle-aged man who had been with the elderly woman beckoned me down a path. He was waving an empty plastic bottle. I followed his lead and we came to a small fountain where he introduced me to the woman who was his mother. "Miraculous water" they both said to me in French. Not for drinking but to bless oneself. He took my hand, dipped it into the water and had me touch my third eye and then both my eyes. The woman told me she had a bad sickness in the stomach and she was praying for a healing. It was possible, she said, because this black madonna was very powerful.

I grabbed my chance: "Why is the madonna black?"
The words came in a torrent.
He said: " The black madonna is of the earth, that is the simple truth."

She said that there were many many black madonnas and that they were "primordiale, pre-historique, avant le Christ." She kept repeating the word "primordiale." I asked if she thought the black madonnas represented the ancient goddess. Perhaps Isis, she said, perhaps something to do with the Greeks, but more significant was the universality of the mother. "La Mama" in her words. With great emphasis she told me that everyone everywhere worshiped the mother, especially where there was beauty or special and unusual features in the land. The mother, she went on to explain, existed before anything else.

I asked if she had studied these things. Oh no, she replied, she simply had a great passion for the black madonnas and through that passion, she understood them deeply.

I smiled broadly, trusting implicitly in the wisdom of this mother. My search was clearly over.

____________________

Deborah Rose, Director of the Magdalineage Project, researches, writes and lectures about aspects of women's spiritual traditions in the West. On March 2-3-4 she and Willow LaMonte will be leading a workshop "A Call from the Black Madonna" at Rowe Conference Center, Rowe, MA. Willow and Deborah will also be guiding a sacred journey tour to Sicily and Malta during Easter week to explore the Black Madonnas and goddess sites on those islands. Deborah is a practicing acupuncturist and herbalist in Somerville, MA. She can be reached at Magdalineage@aol.com.

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