The Black Madonna: an archetype of the Great Mother

The Black Madonna is what calls us down, down to Earth, to our body, to our earth. She is returning now to shatter the illusions of a past patriarchal addiction to a distant, transcendent divinity, the modern addiction to perfection and enlightenment. Black Madonna calls us to the dark soil of the earth as well as the darkness within us, she makes us confront our own darkness that is our ignorance, our self-importance and illusions, and then takes us deeper into the mysteries of divine darkness...but only if we allow her to strip us fully, to take us fully, no holding back, no crawling back—a full confrontation to our true nature, which is the darkness of Mystery itself.

"The Black Madonna is Dark and calls us to the darkness.. Darkness is something we need to get used to again—the “Enlightenment” has deceived us into being afraid of the dark and distant from it. Light switches are illusory. They feed the notion that we can “master nature” (Descartes’ false promise) and overcome all darkness with a flick of our finger. Meister Eckhart observes that “the ground of the soul is dark.” 
Thus to avoid the darkness is to live superficially, cut off from one’s ground, one’s depth. The Black Madonna invites us into the dark and therefore into our depths. This is what the mystics call the “inside” of things, the essence of things. This is where Divinity lies. It is where the true self lies. It is where illusions are broken apart and the truth lies." 
- Matthew Fox

She has many faces, many facets but only reveals the deepest parts when we have washed our hands from 'ourselves'—when we are ready to take the step into the vast emptiness, our nothingness and the empty void that lies within the centre of our psyche and Soul. Sometimes, if you are lucky, she will make you surrender, she will, with a fierce sense of humor, leave you no choice. In those moments that you feel you are betrayed, abandoned, desolated and the last petty worm alive, she is revealing her secrets to you. If only we would learn to speak and understand her language again... we would know, somewhere deep within, in the midst of the chaos of destruction, we are not being destroyed, but prepared and forged by fire to become a vessel for life itself.

- written for the Dancing in Her Flames workshops, by Faranak Mirjalili