Black Virgins
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #38, May 2000
“I am black but comely.” — Song of Solomon 1:5
I am sitting in the South transept of the Gesù, the ever so lovely Jesuit Church on Bleury Street: behind me on the wall are numerous ex-voto marble plaques recalling favours and graces obtained on this site. Before me is the shrine of Our lady of Liesse. Over the altar on a carved wooden pedestal and surrounded by silver votive hearts, the miraculous statue of Our lady holding on her lap the Holy Child is held up by two angels; a banner reads "Causa nostrae laetitiae - Cause of our Happiness".
The church has long been a pilgrimage site to Our Lady of Liesse and since 1977 the statues of the mother and child have been crowned. Our Lady under the title of Liesse has been venerated in Liesse, near the cathedral city of Laon in France, since the Middle Ages. At the Revolution the shrine was desecrated and the statue burned. The ashes piously gathered by the faithful were inserted in a makeshift new statue erected in the shrine shortly after the end of the "Terreur". By the late 1850s a new statue was commissioned for the shrine. The old one, with some of the ashes, was remade and eventually offered to two Canadian Jesuits studying In France. In 1877, it was enthroned in the Church of the Gesù, the flagship of Jesuit presence in Montreal since 1865; the church became a Marian shrine, though it retains its dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Something Terribly Wrong
The statue is nice, a product of the syrupy taste of Second Empire French ecclesiastical artists. The Madonna is fine-featured with pinkish pale skin ... pink skin? There is something wrong here… Our Lady of Liesse should be black! Indeed, the statue now venerated in the original shrine in France is made of ebony, though the features are not particularly negroid. The statue burned at the Revolution was certainly black. Black Madonnas are often said to be miraculous and their fame is such that in many countries they have become national symbols: take, for instance, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil, Our Lady of Monserrat in Spain, Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland, Our Lady of Einsiedeln in Switzerland, Our Lady of Mariazell in Austria, Our Lady of Altötting in Germany, Our Lady of Dublin in Ireland, and Our Lady of Loreto in Italy. Some of these, however, are not statues but icons. In England there are few black Madonnas: Our lady of Walsingham is white, though there are dark copies, based on the old seal of the shrine. Before the Reformation, there were, however, at Walsingham, as well as at Glastonbury, 16th c. replicas of Our Lady of Loreto which were black. The only authentic Black Madonna in England is the 14th c. Our Lady of Mayfield, which, however, may be of Flemish origin and was never the object of any popular cult. Since it has a hand missing, it has often been speculated that it might be the same as Notre-Dame de Boulogne across the channel - of which only a hand remains!
France is the land of the cult of the Black Virgin. There are some three hundred examples surviving mostly in the centre and the south, below a line that goes from Bayonne to Vichy. The most famous are Notre-Dame de Boulogne (or du Grand Retour) at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre at Chartres, Notre-Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, Notre-Dame de la Délivrance at Orcival, Notre-Dame du Puy at Le-Puy, Notre-Dame de Rocamadour, and Notre-Dame de Vassivière. Paris has two, Notre-Dame de la Paix and Notre-Dame de Bonne Délivrance. The first Black Madonna I remember seeing was Notre-Dame de la Daurade in her small shrine on the banks of the Garonne in Toulouse.
The Black Madonna
The typical Black Madonna is represented sitting upright on a throne holding the Holy Child on her lap and presenting Him to the adoration (of the Magi). She is often referred to as a "Virgin in Majesty" or a "Seat of Wisdom", being herself the throne from which her Son reigns. She wears a pre-Medieval hooded robe with long hanging sleeves, while the Child is barefoot and dressed in a toga - he sometimes holds a book and has an arm raised in blessing. She has curiously enlarged hands with long equal fingers. Mother and Child bear on uncanny resemblance of facial features - he is after all the flesh of her flesh.
The statue is carved out of a single block of wood and is commonly about 24-28 inches (an Egyptian cubit!) high. The wood of various kinds is covered with canvas and tape onto which the colour is applied. The skin is dark and the clothing is generally green and red (the blue and white Virgins we know are much more recent). The statue bears no religious attributes or decorations. Most if not all statues carry in the back of the throne a small door which opens into a relic chamber, though it is not known what it might have contained.
Some Black Virgins are said to come from the Near East. Notre-Dame du Puy was given by King Saint Louis on his return from the Crusade in Egypt. Notre-Dame de Liesse was also brought back from Egypt by Crusaders. Indeed, the Crusaders found many shrines of Our Lady in the Holy land, in which the statue venerated was undoubtedly a recycled representation of the Egyptian Goddess Isis holding on her lap her son Horus. The implication of an Egyptian princess by the name of Ismeria (Isis - Maria) in the story of Notre-Dame de Liesse only adds credence to this pagan origin. Others are said to be carved by the Angels or by Saint Luke (this is the case of Our Lady of Montserrat, La Moreneta - the little dark one - also known as La Jerosolimitana - the Jerusalemite). These are typically lost - after being hidden from the invading Saracens. and later found by children, shepherds or woodsmen under miraculous conditions in a felled tree, a sacred spring, a cave, or a lake. Else, they are unearthed in a plowed field, discovered by the bulls which refuse to budge until the plowman digs out the Madonna. The statue is then carried into the town from which it keeps "escaping" back to its place of origin, till a shrine is built to honour her in the sacred site.
Nearly all Black Madonnas were primitively found in rural areas (only secondarily are they city-dwellers), often far from human dwellings. Their setting is commonly associated with ancient Celtic high places and there are often monoliths and sacred wells nearby. The Black Virgins sometimes take over the shrine of an ancient pagan goddess; in Chartres, she replaced on prehistoric Virgo paritura (= virgin that will give birth) venerated by the Celts. Oftentimes, their sites are on or near the great pilgrim-ways to Compostella. In truth, most of them were made In 10-12th c. France; their inspiration owes much to the Byzantine Icons, the Roman mosaics, and the early Medieval manuscript illuminations
All Black Madonnas are wonder-workers and the miracles attributed to them are of two types: first and curiously (since most are far inland), protection of mariners at sea, which may have something to do with the "boat of wisdom" associated with the goddess Isis, the "lady of seafaring"; secondly, the temporary revival of stillborn children in order that they be baptized. From there, arose the habit of invoking her for childbirth and fertility; as such Our Lady of Montserrat presides over marriage and sex.
Why is She Black?
The blackness of the Madonna and Child has always been the subject of much speculation, but no one explanation is entirely satisfactory. There are too many black virgins for their existence to be explained by the sole whim of the sculptor.
The materials used are rarely black, such as ebony or basalt. So the black colouring is a deliberate addition.
Another simple explanation that the blackness represents accumulated soot from the votive candles over the centuries does not account for the fact that generally only the hands and faces are black. The male clergy are often contemptuous of black virgins, explaining their darkness by a secular accumulation of dirt ("dirty virgins") or by damage due to ancient fires.
The idea that the dark complexion of the mother and child are related to the fact that they were from the Middle East and that their skins were sunburnt is plausible, but why does it not apply to the Apostles or St. Joseph?
Others see the influence of the Song of Songs and the glorification of the black Shulamite; the book was, however, popularized too late by St. Bernard to have anything much to do with the origin of the black Virgins.
Some authors see the Black Virgin as an image of doom and gloom in the Dark Ages and the coming Reformation or as the representation of the sufferings of Our Lady. But they are probably only fanciful afterthoughts.
Is there a link between the Black Virgins of the West and the so-called Nicopeion Icons (= victory-maker images) of the East, which are often dark skinned? There is a famous one at St. Mark's in Venice, part of the loot of the Fourth Crusade pillaged from Constantinople, but she is not dark-skinned.
A more convincing explanation is that there is a link between the Black Madonnas and the goddesses of the pagan world. Some of these virgins were found to contain in their small relic-chamber tiny statues and amulets of ancient fecundity goddesses. When the statue at Le Puy was burned at the French Revolution, the relic chamber revealed the presence of a parchment (which went up in flames) and a green and red chalcedony inscribed with symbols related to the cult of Isis. And it is of significance that the spectators to the burning cried "Death to the Egyptian".
There is also a link with the dark colour of the earth, whose blackness is a symbol of fecundity and fertility. Black, now the colour of death, devils and the occult, was in ancient times a symbol of the bountiful richness and regeneration of the soil. Some see a connection with the dark phase of the Moon, hence with the mysterious and occult dimensions of life.
Modern-day feminists describe a link between the Black Madonna and the ancient Mother Goddess which represents the ageless Wisdom of Nature, the mystery of the Soul of the World, the archetype of the Eternal Feminine Principle in the universe, feminine consciousness, hermetic knowledge ... all elements obliterated by centuries of patriarchal Christianity. Many scholars recognize in the Black Virgin elements of the worship of the beloved goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations: Ceres, Demeter, Diana, Cybele, Artemis-Venus and especially Isis. She has become the "dea abscondita" the hidden goddess who is still worshipped regardless, but under a different guise. Isis was commonly represented seated on a throne holding her child Horus - she is the stone seat, the mother of the king from whom he derives his power. Isis is also the devoted mother and the sorrowing wife, images applied to Our Lady. Statues of Isis/Horus were carried throughout Europe by the conquering Roman armies. They were later christianized and renamed Mary and Jesus and are the original source of the black Madonnas. Isis was also referred to as the Great Mother and was particularly venerated in spring (May the month of the Virgin Mothers)
There has been a recent tendency to relate the presence of the Black Madonnas to megalithic earth grids and ley-lines and "highly charged earth centres" in France, as well as to the sacred geometry of Romanesque churches and the electromagnetic field that energize chakra points.
Finally the Black Virgin is not unrelated to Mary Magdalene and the Black Sarah (Sara la Kali) venerated by gypsies. She is thus connected as is everything else in the world to the Knights Templar, the Cathars, and the August Priory of Sion, hence the Merovingian royal blood-line. It Is not fortuitous that Montserrat the shrine of the Black Virgin is also the setting of Parsifal's quest for the Holy Grail. Ultimately, the Black Virgin may symbolize the other Church, that of Mary Magdalene, James, Zacchaeus, the Gnostics, the Cathars, the alchemists, and the troubadours. When the troubadour sings of his wife and mistress, he is also singing of the Church of Rome and the underground church of Catharism, the former nagging and stifling, the latter mysterious but enlightening and liberating.
It is also said that originally the statues bore black African features, but that they were replaced by statues with dark-complexioned Caucasian traits and many have been whitened. And in modern times, nearly all such statues are white and many of the black ones have been put away and replaced by innocuous white ones. The white Notre-Dame de Liesse in our local Gesù church is a prime example of such a movement. Engaged scholars write of the phenomenon as the "obliteration of the African origin of our whitewashed religions".
There is no surprise that ancient religions come ultimately from Africa, since no one now disputes that humankind is of African origin. If there was a garden of Eden, it was somewhere in Africa about 150 000 years ago. There are even some very credible scientists who have traced back a "mitochondrial Eve" who is the mother of all humans and indeed the original black Madonna. The evidence is based on the study of the DNA in mitochondria; mitochondria are ancient bacteria which now live inside cells where they have become the cells' powerhouses. They still contain some of their genetic material as DNA and this is transmitted only through the maternal line; one gets all one's mitochondrial DNA from one's mother. It is therefore possible to trace maternal lines back through evolution. All American Indians can thus be connected to four maternal lineages and all Europeans to nine; these lines are called the daughters of Eve and they can be themselves traced back to the primeval single African Eve, the mother of us all. There is also research to trace a paternal line through the Y-chromosome (which men inherit from their fathers) to a primeval Adam. Linguists and anthropologists are busy fitting language patterns, migrations and cultural diversity to these evolutionary lines. [There was a good write-up on this in the National Post last Wednesday, May 3 - if you are of European origin through your mother you can have your ancestry traced back by examination of cells from the lining of your mouth for a small fee of 100 pounds - see www.oxfordancestors.com.]
Begg, Egan. The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Arkana, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
Birbaum, Lucia Chlavola. Black Madonnas, Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993).
Bonvin, Jacques. Vierges noires. La réponse vient de la terre (Paris: Dervy-Livres. 1988).
Cunneen, Sally. In Search of Mary, the Woman and the Symbol (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1996).
Girard, Laval. Notre-Dame de Liesse (Montréal: Église du Gesù, 1966, 1985).