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The Seven Faces of the Black Madonna
Andrew Harvey
The first face of the Black Madonna is as the Queen of Transcendent Reality, the Queen who's mystery is infinite, the Queen who's mystery can never be exhausted, no philosophy will ever exhaust Her no mystical discipline will ever completely explain Her, not even the most brilliant genius at the most brilliant moment of total
inspiration will ever receive more than a ray from Her astounding treasury of wonders because in the final reality the ultimate reality is a dark, fecund void out of which the light bursts in ecstasy to create the worlds. Imagine the world before the "big bang," imagine the cosmos before and you have an idea of the enormity of the power hidden in that transcendent darkness that can never be completely known.
And when you begin to worship the Dark One in this way, when you take the Black Queen into your life as the transcendent mystery, an enormous blessing comes to you of humility and of constant striving to progress, because you know that this force will always be drawing you ever upward to new levels of incarnation and bliss, because it is the ultimate force from which all the worlds are being manifested at
every moment.
And I want to read to you two extraordinary mystical descriptions of this darkness at the core of reality which some people have interpreted as the kind of darkness that you
that happens to you when you stare into the sun, a darkness from so much light that no known senses can register it as anything but darkness, because it's light power is so stupendous.
And the first quotation, and I invite you to close your eyes, because this quotation in its radiance and its beauty will convey something of the majesty of what I'm talking about, of the Black Queen and this is Dionysis, the to Syrian mystic of the sixth century talking about the deep, dazzling darkness at the core of God. And he calls it the Trinity.
"Trinity higher than any being, any divinity, guide of Christians and the wisdom of Heaven, lead us beyond unknowing and beyond light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture where the mysteries of God's word lie simple, absolute, and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence." Amid the deepest shadow, they pour overwhelming light on what is most manifest, and amid the wholly unsensed and unseen, they completely fill our sightless minds with treasures beyond all beauty. That void from which the great avalanche of energy and light creating the universe is constantly being born."
And another poem, and please rest in yourself and let this poem by St. John of the Cross take you deeper, even, into the mystery of this hidden darkness this infinite reserve, this infinite black transcendent regal power from which all things come. And this poem is called "The Fountain."
"How well I know that flowing spring in black of night, the eternal fountain is unseen, how well I know where she has been, in black of night I do not know her origin, none yet in her all things begin in black of night. I know that nothing is so fair and Earth and firmament drink there, in black of night. I know that none can wade inside to find her bright, bottomless tide in black of night. Her shining never has a blur; I know that all light comes from Her, in black of night. I know Her streams converge and swell and nourish people, skies and hell in black of night. The stream whose birth is in this source, I know has a gigantic force in black of night. The stream from but these two precedes, yet neither one I know precedes
in black of night. The eternal fountain is unseen, in living bread that gives us being in black of night. She calls on all mankind to start to drink Her water, tho in dark for black is night. Oh, living fountain that I crave in bread of life, I see Her flame in black of night."
So that is the first face of the Black Madonna, the face of the primordial darkness, of the light void from which all things come forever. The ultimate mystery, forever unknowable, forever drawing all things to incarnate every more of its splendor and its beauty, her splendor and her beauty."
The second face of the Black Madonna is one that seems immediately paradoxical, and this face is of the Queen of Nature, and of all of fecund and glowing and sensual and sexual processes of nature the face of the black soil that bears the richest and deepest golden corn. And this face, the face of the Queen of Nature is calling out to us and saying "Awake to your connection with the corn, awake to
your connection with every single animal, feel the richness of the Earth within you, feel the leap of the dolphin within you, rise up and spout from the middle of your head the great cataracts of water that the whale spouts in the middle of the seas of Hawaii realize that you are connected at the primordial sense with every part of my creation that I am, and that you follow its rhythms, and that you have its blood pulsing in your veins, and that you know it from within it, because I live in it and in you on every level, and I am the Queen of Nature and nature is my manifestation."
And this Queen of Nature is inviting all of us to give up our anthropological and anthropomorphic, our self-obsession as human beings and start realizing that we are in the best and highest and most paganly, radiant sense animals which have an animal connection to all that lives, that is supremely beautiful, supremely empowering and supremely in danger of being destroyed by the completely
artificial situation that we have created which is killing us and nature.
So, this face of the Queen of Nature beckoning us to know her rhythms, follow her logic, participate in her dance of death and rebirth, open to her fecundity, trust our animal instincts, enter into a radiant interconnection with everything that lives this Queen of Nature is trying to wake us up to our part of divine nature before in
our dissociation, and in our coma we destroy this planet, ourselves with it.
That is the second face of the divine, Dark One.
The third face is that she comes to us, this Dark One, with the face of the tantra the face of sublime, sexual ecstasy. The face of a sexuality that is not derided, isn't stamped down, isn't indulged in pornographic ways, but is a sexuality that is consecrated as her sexuality is consecrated to the divine masculine, given up totally in abandoned love. Bede said to me the most beautiful teaching I ever received on tantric sexuality, he said the problem with the West is that it can see sexuality only in terms of repression or indulgence, and their two sides of Puritanism, but there is another way which is the way of the Black Madonna, which is a way that gives access to tremendous healing, radiance and power and glory and celebration and golden energy and that is the way of tantric sexuality, which is a way in which two beings, they can be gay or straight come together to honor, worship and celebrate each other and to dedicate their lovemaking to the divine in each other so that their lovemaking can flame out with God bliss.
And this flaming out of God bliss in the core of tantric ecstasy is not simply an indulgence for the human race, it's actually one of the holy energies that are going to rebuild the human race cellularly because once that pagan energy is explosively let out, and once its connected to all the other chakras, including the transcendent chakra, then what you have in your body is a racing column of fire,
of flame, of energy that never runs out because it is the love energy of the niverse it's the pagan love energy and that pagan love energy is what will give all sacred activists their juice, their wildness, their courage, their sass, their chutzpa, their capacity to go on as fully embodied, fully radiant beings radiating the joy of being alive.
So when the Queen of Tantra turns up to humanity and says isn't it time you give up your stupid repressions and your Puritanisms and your idiotic games of control in the bedroom and give up too your addictions to pornography and your addictions to domination and start becoming radiant ones again, innocent ones again, people who make love with the force of the whole of reality behind you, and the whole
adoration of the divine in you and come into the spaciousness and grandeur of who I really am and what I will give, if you do which is nothing less than the divine energy in your own body and in your own life.
That is the third face of the great Dark Queen.
The fourth face is the face that the Hindus call Kali, and Kali is always shown with a necklace of skulls around her head, her tongue lolling out with blood dripping from it, and a sword, which she is using with some kind of acrobatic lunacy. And what is symbolized by that image is something that every woman knows very well, and every woman knows very well is terrifying to almost every man, who hasn't
dealt with it which is a feminine power to see through hypocrisy, to see through games, to see through agendas, to see through fantasies and an absolutely ruthless commitment to the truth that lies on the other side of all those illusion and agendas and fantasies.
In other words, when that Black Kali is let out, her creative destruction of illusion, her creative destruction of agendas, her creative annihilation in a kind of sacred fury of all those neurotic absorptions with the limitation that keep you and I trapped in our limited identity that is what that force lets out. That is what
that force does to you it strips you, it burns you, it shakes your life to your foundations, it makes your worst fears materialize in front of you not to terrorize you, but to finally take you into that place where you are laughing with her as she chops you up into a million pieces, because you know that the person who is laughing and the laugh and the goddess are one.
Right?
So, the Queen of the Destruction of Illusions, the liberator from this realm of illusion.
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