The French Grail and the Dark Madonna: Post # 7 of Beyond Religious Conflicts

The French legendary history that interests mystery writer Milt Walters in Deepest France: A Novel of the French Grail and in Mysterious Days: Return to Deepest France affirms that the Grail was/is a woman.  It is not a cup made of expensive metals.

In the two novels (now in production) the woman is Mary from Magdala.  This Mary is said to be imperfect in the same sexual way the Gnostics' Sophia is flawed, but just as Sophia brings the divine spark of philo-Sophia into the world, Mary carries the divine blood of the sky gods from the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe.  In contrast to sky gods in general, she does not command men, or women.  But her fundamental humanity nonetheless commands their respect.

In the legend, Mary was the disciple and consort of (perhaps) the least patriarchal of the sky gods, Jesus.  In competing  versions of the account, she is either pregnant by him at the time of the crucifixion or assists him in escaping the crucifixion altogether (probably by having the Cypriot Simon, from Kyreni, not only carry the cross but take Jesus' place).  In the second version (the 'Laughing Jesus' version), during their stay in Egypt she conceives a daughter named Black Sara(h).  In both versions, Mary then travels on to Marseilles to join the sizable Jewish community living there in the first century AD.  Sara's offspring eventually mix their 'divine' blood with the royal blood of the Visigoths in the south of French just north of the Pyrenees.  Finally they marry into the Merovingian royal line, thus giving a literal meaning to the so-called Divine Right of kings.  Although the Merovingian royalty was thought to have been eliminated by the forces of Charlemagne, members of the royal group survived and passed on their blood to a family that still lives in the region and in other parts of France--and is the focus of the events portrayed in Deepest France.

Both the French Grail legend and the English Grail stories attempt to bridge the gap between the earth and the sky.  The Anglo Grail consists of metals found in the earth that are refined to gleam like celestial bodies.  In the French version, Mary is a biological vessel created by one of the fundamental human acts, sex, which in this case allows the living blood of a deity to reside in a (despised?) woman's body for nine months before it becomes an ordinary human.

Rather than re-fashion a metal to suggest sky entities, Mary Magdalena brings the sky down to the earth in a form totally familiar to humankind.  The degree to which this familiarity brings great comfort is apparent in the type of Madonna known as the Black Virgin.  In the numerous churches of the Black Virgin scattered about the earth, many in France, the Blue Sky Virgin of the Roman church has often been blackened by the soot from candles burned in her devotion.  When the priests threaten to clean her up, make her white as new, the parishioners are said to rise up against the effort.  Apparently they find the Black Virgin more comforting to them because she is more human and flawed, closer to themselves.  The same impulse seems to exist for those African and Asian parishioners who prefer their Mary (and their Jesus) to be made of dark materials or colored with dark paints.

The Madonna that impresses Milt Walters in Mysterious Days resembles the African versions made of dark materials.  But she is a special case.  She is carved in a dark wood that has long lain in the earth.  And she holds a dark child in her lap.  Because she seems to mirror his own parental and sexual drives, he feels she is the necessary antidote to the madness of all the high-minded infanticides in the novel.  Since the church where Walters sees her lies so close to Rennes-le-Chateau's church of Mary Magdalena, he suspects this is a statue of that Mary with Black Sara, whom some view as her daughter.  In the midst of a desperate search for a missing child, Walters finds the two figures very comforting.

Sara, however, has her own heritage in addition to that she received from Mary and her consort.  Gypsies who gather at the shrine of the Three Maries in the Camargue, in the delta of the Rhone river, call her Kali and observe rituals that their ancestors in India devoted to Kali-Durga.  Like her 'mother,' Mary, Sara represents the wisdom, the philoS-ophia, the often-affirmed, ancient 'wisdom of the serpents,' which comes from the earth.  Since she was conceived in Egypt, some feel she also possesses the healing energy of Isis.

Although Walters knows nothing of the Kali, Sophia, and Isis connections, he nonetheless senses she is a mighty, syncretic symbol who combines the forces and values needed to remedy the evils of the particular  idealists who in their confusion seem responsible for the atrocities occurring in Deepest France.  For him,  she is a necessary fiction--and one of the comforting forces in the two novels.

Walters and the Dark Madonna Beyond Religious Conflict, Post # 6

Post # 5 ended with mystery author, Milt Walters, standing awed in a nearly forgotten cathedral of southern (deepest) France staring at the statue of a woman with a dark complexion and a royal gown.  He supposes she is the Black Madonna and that the child on her lap may be the Black Sarah of French 'legendary history'.  The question that went unanswered there was what brought him to feel such awe before this figure.  Post # 5 also described the likely effect that the cosmos revealed through the Hubble telescope will have on the religious sensibility of aware humankind.

Although Walters has not himself been staring via the Hubble through both time and space back to the murderous explosion of galaxies that followed our universe's origin in the Big Bang, he has witnessed another kind of horror on the human scale.  This horror causes him to sense that the Dark Madonna before him could be an antidote to the violence around him.  In the present posting, I want to explore reasons this may be the case for Walters as he is portrayed in two novels that should appear later this summer.  At the same time I must resist giving too much of the linked stories away.  

Twenty years earlier in the five sections of DEEPEST FRANCE: A NOVEL OF THE FRENCH GRAIL, Walters and his daughter Anthi became involved with a family in which an imaginative, seemingly brilliant boy was brutally murdered.  Now, in MYSTERIOUS DAYS: RETURN TO DEEPEST FRANCE, Walters confronts a greater evil since numerous very young boys and girls are turning up murdered in a seemingly senseless way.  In the course of seven days, Walters comes to associate these atrocious events with a pattern central to our culture since its beginnings in the crimes commanded for Abraham and Agamemnon to carry out, murders which were to involve Isaac and Iphigenia as victims.  For Walters such murders on the human level arouse the dismay, even existential terror, that one might feel when looking far enough into the sky to witness the pattern of violent creation and explosion that rules the heavenly stars and galaxies.  Just as the galaxies and the contemplated crimes of Abraham and Agamemnon have been said to be controlled by sky deities so are the murders surrounding Walters in MYSTERIOUS DAYS found to be motivated by the highest ideals--about which I cannot say more here for risk of giving away too much of the novel.

In opposition to such 'heavenly' pursuits, the Dark Madonna seems to bring Walters back to earth.  She grounds him in the simple concerns of the planet on which he lives and embodies the values that make life possible here and sustain it.  She is of the soil itself, not the sky.  She is dark and impure rather than a glowing bright light and inhumanly pure; such light surrounds her, but, like her white gown, it only emphasizes her dark complexion.  She simply IS.  She commands nothing, least of all the atrocities committed for the noble ends of control, power, and perfection.  She is not the Black Swan of controlled perfection but the Black Madonna of human and sexual imperfection. She is not heavenly and impossible but earthy and possible.

In the language of the Neo-Psycho-Polytheism (NPPT) with which these blogs began, she comforts Walters by mirroring his need to protect the ordinary children born on this planet rather than to pursue the inhuman ideals of ruthless rulers over nations, lords of industries, and, in the language of math, those $n + 1 billionaires for whom the 1 is always a few billion more, just to out-do their billionaire neighbors.  She seems closer to Parvati and Ganesha, than to the sky gods.   For Walters, she provides the antidote to the boundless, transcending pursuits that destroy the earth and its children.

And she figures in legends of the Grail, as we will discover in the seventh, perhaps last, of our postings here.