02/02/2024
Starting to do daily pulls as a personal practice. I won’t be sharing all of them but I felt this message is meant for more people than just me. The author of this deck is Meggan Watterson and she is a brilliant writer and feminist theologian. She wrote the book “Mary Magdalene Revealed” which has been such a blessing to my life and relationship with Christ and Christianity. I am still fully omnist but I can’t even begin to articulate how much peace she has brought to my soul. The writing is hers, the message is for whoever feels called to it. 🖤
The Black Madonna – Our Lady of the Hermits
I transform pain and suffering into a greater capacity to love.
Who She Is:
The Black Madonna represents the power we all have to emerge from the darkness transformed. There are over 500 Black Madonnas throughout Europe. Historians believe many of the icons are actually of the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son Horus, which were carried over from Egypt during the Crusades. Other icons of the Black Madonna are meant to represent earth goddess and are worshipped for the fertility miracles attributed to them. She is often depicted holding the royal scepter of a ruling monarch.
Jungian psychologist Marion Woodman believes that the Black Madonna represents a new awareness or consciousness toward the earth and our bodies. She represents the wisdom we can only accrue when we go through the often-painful fires of transformation. In The Pregnant Virgin, Woodman relates that “only the intensity of the fire can unite body and soul.” The Black Madonna helps us become conscious of the spirit in matter, of the light in the dark, of the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.
This particular Black Madonna resides in the Benedictine monastery in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. The abbey is dedicated to Our Lady of the Hermits because the chapel where she resides was originally the hermitage of Saint Meinrad, a 9th-century hermit.
Einsiedeln is the birthplace of the renowned alchemist Paracelsus. Alchemy is the physical process of transforming base metals into unalloyed gold, which represents a spiritual and metaphysical process of burning away all obstacles to just be the soul.
The Black Madonna is loved for having been through the fires of loss and for emerging with a greater capacity to love. Every afternoon for hundreds of years, the monks of the abbey have come out from meditation to sing “Salve Regina” to Our Lady of the Hermits.
When Your Soul Selects Her Card:
For millennia the body, the earth, all forms of matter have been devalued and misunderstood. The dark has been so vilified, yet all life emerges from the pitch-black womb. The darkness is potential; it’s the crucial and elemental stage we must all go through to create new or more life. The Black Madonna is the emblem of deep wisdom, the profound consciousness that is inherent in all things. All living and created things are energy. The body has wisdom. The earth has wisdom. And the pain we experience as humans contains deep wisdom.
When we are in the fires of suffering it can be difficult to trust that gold is being forged. It can be hard to trust when we are in terrific pain that there is a process at work that will make us more authentic, more alive, and infinitely freer. It can be almost impossible to accept or notice the presence of the divine when we are at our most human.
The Black Madonna is the cauldron that holds us steadfastly as we endure the alchemy of integrating more soul into our existence. She is the promise that what doesn’t survive the fires of suffering was never meant for us. And she is the presence that is there with us even when we might feel the most alone; reminding us that there is no darkness we can enter without being met by love.
Soul-Voice Meditation: How is my solitude serving me?
Intention: I transform pain and suffering into a greater capacity to love.
