“Notre Dame de Sous-Terre” (Our Lady of the Underground)
Virgin, Mother, Crone
If there is one image that has stuck with me from last year's pilgrimage, it is from our first morning in Chartres Cathedral. Our small group of pilgrims were being led by our guide through a hidden door that opened from inside the bright world of the Cathedral gift shop, descending a small staircase that led to the darkened crypt. Leaving the hordes of visitors behind, we were hit with the quiet, warmth and humidity of an underground grotto, replete with vaulted ceilings…
The cathedral above was light-filled and breath-taking with its three enormous and beautiful stained-glass Rose windows, world-renowned Labyrinth and monumental statuary. Chartres has been for centuries the destination of pilgrimages dedicated to the Virgin Mary, described by UNESCO as "one of the most authentic and complete works of religious architecture of the early 13th century."1
Through the dimly lit darkness of the crypt below, we sense rows of chairs on our left and right as we begin to walk the long path forward. We are being drawn toward a small, dark figure that we see in the distance ahead of us. Lit only by one small, overhead spotlight and adjacent votive candles, it is SHE, the Vierge Noire - the Black Virgin, SHE who is called "Notre Dame de Sous-Terre" (Our Lady of the Underground) and SHE who has called to me in an inner sense, most of my adult life.
Behind her is a Gallo-Roman style well, often called the ‘Well of the Strong Saints’, because according to legend, many martyrs were thrown into the well. It used to bring water to the citadel of Chartres when the town was besieged, before becoming part of the crypt. In her book, Crossing to Avalon, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes of this area that it was “the site that was once the Druid’s sanctuary of sanctuaries, on a mound or elevation where there was once a sacred wood… Here, carved in the hollowed out trunk of a pear tree, once existed a statue of a dark woman or a goddess with an infant on her knees, believed to have been made by Druids before the birth of Christ… It is because of the sacredness of the ground upon which the cathedral stands that among all the cathedrals in France, Chartres is the only one that has no bodies buried in it.”2
I was first introduced to The Black Madonna by writer and Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman. Back in the late 1980’s Woodman was writing about her as a healing metaphor who represented a new consciousness that was coming through the dreams of many of her analysands, men and women. I, myself, had had such dreams and was hungry to understand what they meant, and what my “longing for darkness” was all about.
“She is dark. Sometimes she’s a black woman or Indian or Portuguese. I think she is dark because she is unknown to consciousness… Throughout history the Black Madonna has presided over fertility, sexuality, and childbirth. She is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting her own body as the chalice of the spirit. She has to do with the sacredness of matter; the intersection of sexuality and spirituality… The Black Madonna is the Bridge. She is a spiritual figure in a physical body, so she acts as a bridge between head and heart. She’s a Wisdom figure.”3
One dream of her came to me the night that I had just experienced a powerful ritual/ceremony for the first time with one of my early teachers of ritual, Elizabeth Cogburn. In the dream I could still hear the Mother Drum beating in the background and I held a lit candle in my hand. I was given the task of carrying the flame up a steep hill to light the candle on the large ceremonial altar at the top of the hill. I knew that it was essential that I complete this task. It was getting dark and there was a fierce wind blowing as I was climbing the steep terrain, trying to keep my balance and protect the flame with my hands. Just as I was nearing the top and I despairingly saw that the flame was about to be extinguished by the wind, a larger-than-life dark-skinned woman jumped out from behind the altar and grabbed my arm, helping me up and shielding the flame, enabling me to complete my task. As she did so, she exclaimed, “Keep it lit, girl!” When I awoke, I thought of a phrase from one of David Whyte’s poems… “Always this energy smoulders inside, when it remains unlit, the body fills with dense smoke.”4 I think that this dream spoke to how to deal with my personal struggle with depression as a young adult but also spoke to the nascent calling that I was feeling in myself to become a ceremonialist for the collective.
At that time I was in my thirties. I needed to learn and integrate the Black Madonna in her Virgin aspect. The original and ancient meaning of the word Virgin was “One-in-Herself”. As Marion puts it:
“The Virgin is who she is because she is living her own essence. The Latin verb esse means to be, present tense, I am. She is aware of her own feelings, needs and values, and has the courage to act on them. She has presence. She is much more interested in process than results. She understands resonance – truth resonating in her body, like an echo chamber saying, ‘Yes.” She’s a receiver.”5
Although I had chosen to not have children of my own, later in my early-50’s it was the Mother aspect of the Black Madonna that called to me. My own personal mother, who was my best friend, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I was losing her slowly, year by year, to this terrible disease that steals one’s own conscious identity, even as the body continues to live. I needed the help of the Transcendent Mother to help me cope with the incredible sadness and helplessness that I felt as my mother became more and more diminished from the vibrantly alive, intelligent, and creative being that she had been all her life. I was buoyed up by this sense of the Divine, Dark Mother caring for me. It is the Black Madonnas that are the healers and that teach that there is renewal in loss and death.
In 2015 I took a solo pilgrimage to Mexico City to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the Black Madonna of the Americas. In the fall of 2017 I took a longer pilgrimage through France to visit some of the many Black Madonnas there, and as fate would have it, my mother died shortly before that trip. I was at her beside when she took her final breath. I took some of my mother’s ashes with me on that pilgrimage and I dreamt of her in Esperaza, in the South of France: My mother was standing at my bedside. She was young and vibrant again, looking like she did when the two of us had traveled together through Europe on our bicycles in 1973. She was one of four beings that agreed to accompany me on my pilgrimage journey and offer protection. I heard her say “Okay”, and as I woke, I watched her image silently disappear.
I cut my trip short in France that fall to go on a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage: to scatter her ashes on the white sand beach of the North Shore of the sacred Island of Iona, off the Western coast of Scotland, (where she and I had spent time together in 1985.) I spent the Days of the Dead there, October 31st through November 2nd, the days when the “veil between the worlds is thin”. The weather was typically quite stormy for that time of year: cold, with pouring rain and heavy winds. On the third day of my ceremonial stay, however, the day dawned clear, calm, and unseasonably warm. This held for about 6 hours, supporting my ritual as I walked the beach, talked with her and found the right spot to spread her ashes. Heading home the next day, on the small ferry from Iona to the Isle of Mull, the rain and wind had returned. However, during the ferry crossing a huge rainbow shone in the sky, blessing the rightness of making this trip in honor of my beloved mother. I love thinking about her as forever a part of that sacred Isle.
Now that I am in my late 60’s, it is more the Black Madonna in her Crone aspect that I am invoking and learning from. The Crone is the Divine Feminine in her crossroads aspect, a place where you must let go of your ego will to invoke a higher Will. From Marion, again:
“The Crone has gone through one crossroads after another. She has reached a place of surrender where her ego demands are no longer relevant. This is the positive side of the Crone. She is a surrendered instrument and therefore detached. Detachment doesn’t mean indifference. It means she has been there. She has suffered, but she can draw back from the suffering… She can be who she is and live with the straight, flat-out naked truth. Therefore, Crone acts as a tuning fork in an environment because she is so real herself. She brings people into that soul space where all outer conflicts dissolve, and they can experience their own essence… Another quality of a mature Crone is a developed masculinity…She would be able to cut with a well-honed sword. I always envision her wielding a golden sword with a silver handle. All the perceptivity of gold but handled with the love of silver. The masculine and feminine together.”6
This brings us to the divine child that often sits in the lap of the Black Madonna… her son is the image of potential masculinity which is very different from what we generally associate with patriarchy, and a masculinity that the world needs. “If we ever bring the Black Madonna’s son to consciousness,” says Woodman, “our idea of mature masculinity will be revolutionized.”7 This means the masculine in women as well as men.
The Black Madonnas usually appear outdoors, so she is related to nature. Woodman has a sense that she also has to do with consciousness in matter.
“We cannot go back to identifying with mater, unconscious matter; and there never has been an era of conscious femininity. The world has never known Conscious Mother, let alone Conscious Mature Woman. We have to connect to her because the power that drives the patriarchy, the power that is raping the earth, the power drive behind addictions, has to be transformed. There has to be a counterbalance to all that frenzy, annihilation, ambition, competitiveness and materialism.”8
Months later, back on Whidbey Island, as I ascend the irregular steps to the privacy of my own “cathedral”, (the meditation tower that my husband, Jerry built for me as a wedding gift) I see a single spotlight focused on an image of the Black Madonna that dominates the altar in the candle-lit darkness. I bow in homage to Her. I am once again, through the imaginal realm, back in the crypt underneath Chartres Cathedral seeing Our Lady of the Underground in her radiant darkness. I give thanks for the safety of our trip and the powerful experiences we had together as a group and the insights that each individual woman had in relation to her own intentions for her pilgrimage. I give thanks for the Wisdom of the Black Madonna in her Virgin, Mother and Crone aspects and the new dispensation that her Divine Son represents. I ask that She may continue to resonate as a healing metaphor in our culture and through the beauty of the natural world. May she continue to bring through her new consciousness. I pray for her Mercy, continual Grace, and Healing Blessings on this planet which is in greater peril, now, than ever before.
1. UNESCO World Heritage website, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/81/
2. Jean Shinoda Bolen, Crossing to Avalon, HarperCollins publishers, 1994, pg.29.
3. Common Boundary, vol. 7, no. 2(march/April 1989).
4. David Whyte, River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007, Many Rivers Press, pg.243
5. Common Boundary, vol. 7, no. 2(march/April 1989).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.