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.
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