[Author’s Note: This essay in four parts is my webinar talk given to the Ubiquity University online Chartres Community Meeting ‘Madonna Rising’ August 14th, 2020]
The Virgin Mary Part 2
In the last 1000 years there have been at least 21,000 visions of Mary, some of which have led to the creation of places of healing, like Lourdes, and to the prophecies of Fatima, in Portugal. For centuries, millions of people, particularly women, have prayed to Mary for healing in sickness, for protection from danger and persecution and for a safe delivery in childbirth, leaving countless expressions of gratitude in her shrines for answers to their appeals for help in the crises of their lives. But she is also appearing in women’s dreams. I have recently been sent a remarkable dream about the Divine Mother healing the Earth with her tears.[1]
Marie, the dreamer, writes: “She simply surfaced into my conscious dream, and remained there, standing silent and still in front of me for quite a while. And then I sank into a deep sleep. It was on the Libra full moon, the 8th of April 2020. The next day I was urged to make an illustration which I did. These are her words which go with the painting she did.
“The Divine Mother is healing the waters of our Earth, first and foremost, the oceans, with Her tears of concern for our Mother Planet. It is a circuit of two types of water — calibrated with Her Divine Intent of purification and healing — with salt water and sweet water. She is answering our prayers of tears of grief for our Mother Planet.”
“The sun blazes from Her open heart, lighting up the entire space around our Earth with Divine Rays. Due to this liquid-light purification and healing, the new feminine essence is able to sprout two blossoms expressing the two types of Divine Ecstasy of the two Mary’s – the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene – sprouting from the core-egg or Kore-seed of our Earth.”
Although Mary is addressed as Queen of Heaven, she has also stood as Intercessor between humanity and her son, holding within her person the supreme values of the heart and the connecting principle of the soul. As all the Great Mothers before her, Mary annuls duality because she embodies the principle of relationship — the relationship of the whole of creation to the divine ground that enfolds it. She is the Grail of compassion and healing, the guardian of the sacredness of all forms of life. She embodies for women in particular, the image of the Self, or the divine core of their nature.
The full dimensions of the Virgin Mary are more easily understood if we look beyond her to the image of the Shekinah. Many images that belonged to the Shekinah as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit were mysteriously transferred to Mary, showing the persistence of archetypal ideas. Reflection on Mary as Intercessor between God and humanity reveals the veiled form of the Shekinah as the feminine face of God, the divine compassionate presence within all created life as shown in the beautiful painting of the Madonna de la Misericordia by Piero della Francesca, where Mary gathers humanity within the protection of her cloak.
Wisdom, Compassion, Love, Justice, Beauty and Harmony; the ability to heal, nurture, protect and cherish — all these values are associated with the Heart and all are associated with Mary. Wherever the association is made between love and divinity, between beauty and harmony and divinity, between compassion and divinity, between justice and divinity, there stands the image of Mary as holder of the values of the Divine Feminine.
The painters of the Renaissance show Mary’s womb penetrated by a shaft of light from the Holy Spirit in the way that the ray of light from the divine source penetrated the “sea of glory” of the Shekinah’s womb. Mary is addressed as the Root and Portal of Life, as the Womb of Creation, the Fountain and the Rose Garden. Like the Shekinah, she may be experienced as the secret, hidden ground of the soul. Many of the images evoked in the great Orthodox Akathist hymn to Mary address her as this ineffable ground: the height unattainable by human thought; the depth invisible even to the eyes of angels; the womb of divine incarnation; the field of the immortal crop; the planter of our life; the haven; the fount of love; the inexhaustible treasure.[2] Mary is the rose, the lily, and also the Tree of Life from which all who turn to her can draw sustenance — an image that returns us to the Shekinah as well as to Isis nourishing souls from the Tree of Life.
The way the artists of the Renaissance painted these images immortalises the original story. An artist called Gentile da Fabriano painted Mary seated in a grove of fruit trees, thereby showing the continuity of the sacred grove or tree that was always associated with the Goddess. Without the sensitivity and genius of the artist and sculptor from the earliest civilizations, we would have no visible record of all the great myths and stories that have arisen from the greater consciousness within us to enrich our soul. All these precious images, read as describing the unfathomable ground of being that is also the unfathomable ground of our own soul, bring Mary closer to us as the root and foundation of our own consciousness.
The cult of the Virgin Mary reached an astonishing height in the Middle Ages. Within 125 years 500 churches the size of Chartres were built in France, all dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the portals of Chartres and Notre Dame, Mary is portrayed as the Queen of Heaven, seated on the Throne of Wisdom, like Isis before her.
In many of these cathedrals and churches are found the magnificent wooden statues of the Black Madonna whose numinous, hieratic presence hold their fascination and their healing power to this day. All show Mary as Theotokos or ‘Mother of God’, some crowned, and all seated on the Throne of Wisdom, holding her son on her lap. These images are the principal descendants of the older Great Goddesses, in particular Isis, who was worshipped all over the Roman Empire and whose temples were rededicated to Mary, one as late as 600 CE. Many statues of Isis show her holding her son Horus on her lap. The colour black returns us to the Shulamite – black but beautiful – of the Song of Songs, to the lustrous black robe of Isis as seen in Apuleius’ famous vision, but above all to the Wisdom Tradition and to the Shekinah whose black veil hides the radiance of her glory. I should add that these numinous images also stand for the forgotten Wisdom of Nature, our Mother.
Later, particularly in the work of the artists of the early Renaissance, the emphasis moves to Mary as the mother of the infant Jesus. Italian, German and Flemish artists painted countless images of the Annunciation and the Nativity. But the imagery takes us deeper when Mary is shown seated in a rose bower. From earliest times the rose was associated with her, carrying forward the ancient association of this exquisite flower with earlier goddesses. Mary was named ‘The Rose Garden’ and the Rosary, used in countless prayers addressed to her, was also called The Rose Garden.
Mary was known in the Middle Ages – the time of the building of Chartres – as the Rosa Mystica.To find its shape so emphasised in the three great rose windows of this and other Gothic cathedrals suggests that the symbolism of the rose held supreme significance for its enlightened builders. I think the Rose Windows are glorious mandalas radiating Divine Wisdom, Light and Love.
The image of Mary mourning her slain son, connects her to all the Great Goddesses who mourned their sons, some of whom went in search of him in the underworld and brought him back to life. But I can never contemplate the image of the Pietà without thinking of all the millions of young men who have been slaughtered in the wars and persecutions of the past millennia and the desperate grief of mothers who have given birth to them and lovingly helped them grow to manhood. War is an outrageous insult to Women and to Motherhood.
When, in pictures of the Coronation of the Virgin, Jesus offers Mary the crown as they sit together on the Throne of Heaven, we can look through the Christian image to the ancient celebration of the sacred marriage which mythically, brought together heaven and earth, sun and moon, goddess and god. They sit side by side, each clothed in a flower or star-strewn robe, each glorifying the other. The image given is of a marriage between the Virgin Mary and Christ who, by his gesture of crowning her, acknowledges her as Queen of Heaven.
If the profound meaning of this sacred marriage could become fully conscious in our soul, there would be healing for ourselves, regeneration for our ailing civilization, and hope for our survival on this planet. If could open our hearts to the cosmic union of the Divine Father-Mother, we would awaken to the utter sacredness and blazing radiance of the whole of creation and the Presence of the Light in which we live, move, and have our being.
I suggest two or three pictures – one on page 2 of the Baptism of Christ (Verrochio) which should have a dove in it (see attached) and one of the Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca (attached). I think there may be a Wikimedia Commons one. Or one of the Rose Window of the Virgin from Chartres.
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Anne Baring
[1] Reproduced here with her permission.
[2] See Harvey, Andrew and Baring, Anne, The Divine Feminine, The Akathist Hymn to Mary.