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.
Showing posts with label the Black Madonna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Black Madonna. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The Persistence of Religions, Post # 5
How can we explain the strange persistence of religions given that the sciences have eroded most of their explanatory powers and nation states have gradually replaced much of their former power to provide order and social structure?
In earlier posts here we noted the ability of the Homeric religion to explain what happens in the hidden interiors of plants, animals, and humans using myths of deities and an assortment of minor divinities. We also mentioned the importance of Roman Christianity in supporting imperial might and structural order. We have to admit that the rise of modern science, state religions, and multiple independent nations have vanquished the importance of centralized Christianity and damaged its explanatory authority.
In post # 4, we observed the shift of religious focus and definition among the Enthusiasts, Kierkegaard, and Rudolph Otto to an emphasis on extraordinary emotions, whether comforting or terrifying and awe-inspiring. I then wondered how any religion centered on a patriarchal sky god in a cosmos centered on man, the earth, or even the sun could possibly come to terms with the violent, immense, exploding universe we have recently discovered using the cosmos-splitting Hubble telescope. It is surprising that an evangelical president like George W. Bush did not order the Hubble program squashed the way he did stem-cell research. The Hubble universe has room for many extraordinary things, but an omnipotent anthropomorphic male deity in charge is probably not one them. The Hubble sky is not a realm in which we can seek much human reassurance. No sky god in that cosmos would have much time or energy to waste on this insignificant planet or its human inhabitants. It would be just as grandiose for us to think otherwise as it was for anyone in the age of Galileo and Copernicus to cling to visions of a geocentric universe.
Yet religions persist. One may wonder why.
In my forthcoming novel, Mysterious Days, a writer of murder mysteries, Milt Walters, stands beyond an absurdly but magnificently arrayed female statue in an all but abandoned cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stares at her dark face and the dark child before her. He reads an account of how this statue was discovered by a local plowman centuries before when his plowshare struck it. The plowman took it to his hut for the night, but when he woke it was gone. He went back to where he'd found it, and there it was again. Walters ponders the figure before: "Milt knew the story he was reading did not explicitly account for her most salient characteristic, the color of her skin. For him as for others in past centuries, the dark Madonna had taken on ever deeper meanings, ones he hesitated even now to share with this daughter. In his reflections, she was more of the earth than the blue sky, more of the red flesh than the bodiless spirit, more in the realm of the feminine than the blue Madonna, who belonged to the father’s sky. The dark Madonna always seemed more completely human in her sexual being than the divine mother who for centuries had caused humans to long for the inhuman sky—for the transcendent state realized in death. ... The pair represented no ordinary Madonna and child. It showed in her serene face, free of the terrible split between the sky and the earth, and in her extraordinary complexion. Her color did not derive from pale clouds but from the olive hue of earth, bark, and countless fruits and nuts. She had to be the dark Madonna he had pursued for decades . . .."
As Mysterious Days points out, "The Black Madonna is found in over a hundred churches in France and in several hundred more around the globe." Again one has to ask why. Walters, who himself creates fictions, realizes that the legendary history of the Black Madonna is probably another fiction and has absolutely no "authority" nor makes any claim to impose either social or spiritual structures of order. In itself, it lacks explanatory powers. In fact, it asks more questions than it answers, questions that you as a reader of this blog might want to address before I explore them from Walter's point of view in the next posting. I hope you will.
In earlier posts here we noted the ability of the Homeric religion to explain what happens in the hidden interiors of plants, animals, and humans using myths of deities and an assortment of minor divinities. We also mentioned the importance of Roman Christianity in supporting imperial might and structural order. We have to admit that the rise of modern science, state religions, and multiple independent nations have vanquished the importance of centralized Christianity and damaged its explanatory authority.
In post # 4, we observed the shift of religious focus and definition among the Enthusiasts, Kierkegaard, and Rudolph Otto to an emphasis on extraordinary emotions, whether comforting or terrifying and awe-inspiring. I then wondered how any religion centered on a patriarchal sky god in a cosmos centered on man, the earth, or even the sun could possibly come to terms with the violent, immense, exploding universe we have recently discovered using the cosmos-splitting Hubble telescope. It is surprising that an evangelical president like George W. Bush did not order the Hubble program squashed the way he did stem-cell research. The Hubble universe has room for many extraordinary things, but an omnipotent anthropomorphic male deity in charge is probably not one them. The Hubble sky is not a realm in which we can seek much human reassurance. No sky god in that cosmos would have much time or energy to waste on this insignificant planet or its human inhabitants. It would be just as grandiose for us to think otherwise as it was for anyone in the age of Galileo and Copernicus to cling to visions of a geocentric universe.
Yet religions persist. One may wonder why.
In my forthcoming novel, Mysterious Days, a writer of murder mysteries, Milt Walters, stands beyond an absurdly but magnificently arrayed female statue in an all but abandoned cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stares at her dark face and the dark child before her. He reads an account of how this statue was discovered by a local plowman centuries before when his plowshare struck it. The plowman took it to his hut for the night, but when he woke it was gone. He went back to where he'd found it, and there it was again. Walters ponders the figure before: "Milt knew the story he was reading did not explicitly account for her most salient characteristic, the color of her skin. For him as for others in past centuries, the dark Madonna had taken on ever deeper meanings, ones he hesitated even now to share with this daughter. In his reflections, she was more of the earth than the blue sky, more of the red flesh than the bodiless spirit, more in the realm of the feminine than the blue Madonna, who belonged to the father’s sky. The dark Madonna always seemed more completely human in her sexual being than the divine mother who for centuries had caused humans to long for the inhuman sky—for the transcendent state realized in death. ... The pair represented no ordinary Madonna and child. It showed in her serene face, free of the terrible split between the sky and the earth, and in her extraordinary complexion. Her color did not derive from pale clouds but from the olive hue of earth, bark, and countless fruits and nuts. She had to be the dark Madonna he had pursued for decades . . .."
As Mysterious Days points out, "The Black Madonna is found in over a hundred churches in France and in several hundred more around the globe." Again one has to ask why. Walters, who himself creates fictions, realizes that the legendary history of the Black Madonna is probably another fiction and has absolutely no "authority" nor makes any claim to impose either social or spiritual structures of order. In itself, it lacks explanatory powers. In fact, it asks more questions than it answers, questions that you as a reader of this blog might want to address before I explore them from Walter's point of view in the next posting. I hope you will.
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