Yuletide scenes are all around us despite the scarily warm
solstice in New York. Bells are ringing, malls are crowding, and in some
quarters Christmas caroling can be heard.
The US media is agog with serious problems such as whether Santa Claus was
white and the even more troubling problem that Jesus might not be a blue eyed
blonde man. In India a benighted Supreme
Court upheld a British colonial law against homosexuality. In the Emirates of Russia, Putin the Vlad may
need to rethink his anti LGBT laws since Billy Jean King and other openly gay
athletes will represent the US in the Winter Olympics.
But there is reason for hope; under protests, the Indian government
has asked the court to review the law because it "violated the principle
of equality". India’s brilliant
mythologist Devdutt Puttnaik upset a lot of Hindus by declaring that homophobia
is not a part of India’s religious heritage. http://devdutt.com/blog/hindu-not-homophobic.html.
And there are good tidings from Moscow: Nadia
and Masha, the two jailed members of the Russian feminist punk group have been
released. It seems this is a good day to
write ‘a punk prayer’ for a New Year that will have the 100 year anniversary of
the First World War. So this Christmas season when the birth of a divine child
is being celebrated, this lover of Kali invokes ‘the Mother of God’ in her dark
incarnation as the Black Madonna of Europe.
I dedicate this blog to my dear Greek friends George and Toula Harlampoudis.
I had recently watched the Sundance documentary film, Pussy Riots: A Punk Prayer about the Russian
case. Not knowing much about the controversy, I was struck by the scene when
these women touched the ground and invoked Maria, the Mother of God as they
prepared to ‘storm’ the Christ the Savior Church in Moscow. I was puzzled that
they were imprisoned due to their supposed ‘religious hatred,’ and yet they
were calling out to the Virgin. By the end of the film, it made perfect sense
to me that these ‘holy fools’ would invoke the Mother of God to protest against
Putin’s dictatorial rule in a patriarchal church that condones it. After all the original Mother of God, Egypt’s
Isis, whose image with Horus on her breast was the model for Madonna and Child,
was a benefactor of the downtrodden.
Isis, the first child of Geb and Nut, was a friend of the
“slaves, sinners and artisans” among others.
Her story bespeaks of the pain woman endures for her right to give birth
and nurture. It is significant that the image of Nut, her mother, is one of
those rare portrayals of the sky as feminine that envelops the world and
protects Geb, the masculine earth, destabilizing easy gendering of father sky
and mother earth. In ancient times the
Mother power that presides over birth and death and renews life in cyclical
understanding of time was venerated in myriad forms, and there was no spiritual
rivalry between men and women. She
inhabits the mystery of interiority and makes our lived life numinously
real.
Having grown up in India with Kali and myriad goddesses of
every shape and hue, I know in my blood that the Divine Mother cannot be
ensconced within any national or religious border, and cannot really be
destroyed because she represents the mystic river flowing deep within all
religions. Hence, I had haunted many a European land in search of the lost
Mother God of the West. I had found her hiding in plain sight although
patriarchal monotheism had erased the Name of the Woman from the exoteric space
of the Divine. Church authorities deny
the existence of the Black Madonna who is not under the power of patriarchy. In 2006, led by China Galland’s book Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black
Madonna, I visited the Einsindeln monastery outside of Zurich and had the
darshan of a magnificent Black Virgin with black Jesus in her arms. The Carl Jung institute nearby invokes her to
lead people to wholeness out of their modern neurosis.
For me, this mysterious figure experientially attested to
the Gnostic lore of a different Christianity.
Elaine Pagels studied the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and wrote her 1979 book
The Gnostic Gospels. Now innumerable feminist theologians are
recognizing the role the discredited Mary, Mary of Magdala, played in early
Christianity. In my physical travels,
textual studies and inner journeys, I had begun to suspect that the dark Mary
is a remnant of ancient mother goddesses of Europe, and somehow in the Black
Virgin, the Biblical white and black Maries merge beyond dichotomies. I
regularly teach the transformational text the Gospel of Mary in my “The Goddess in World Religions” class along
with the Song of Songs of the Hebrew Bible and pay homage to the hard work of
feminist theologians and seekers.
In 2007 in Cyprus, I gave a paper on the Black Madonna at a
conference and then visited Ephesus in Turkey where the third Ecumenical
Council in 431 CE upheld that a “mere woman”, human mother of Jesus will continued
to be venerated as Theotokos, the Mother of God. The newly created creed needed its own
version of a maternal figure since the entire area worshipped Isis and other
powerful mother goddesses like Demeter. The
nascent patriarchal church did not know what it was letting loose; after all
the utterance, the Mother of God is a rather uneasy reminder of the primacy of
the Mother Principle. Later, leaders of
the Reformation abolished the feast of Assumption and other such festivals to
purge patriarchal Christianity of anything feminine, so called Mariolatry.
As I walked the ancient streets of Ephesus strewn with Greek
goddesses, I recognized the archetypal significance of the place. Ephesus was the home of Artemis who was
originally created out of a black meteor and might have been first worshipped
by the famed Amazons. I had a glimpse of
the birth place of Aphrodite in Paphos, Cyprus, who was the alchemical goddess.
On the streets of Nicosia, I met my dear
friend Lazaro Soteri, a brilliant healer and shaman. I witnessed the power of Athena in Athens as
I stood on the Acropolis on a clear crisp summer day. I descended into a cave shrine of the Virgin
Mother in the island of Samos and also felt the power of the Delphic womb in
Delphi. I understood why the Greeks call
the Virgin, Parthena which was another name of Athena. The original meaning of virgin was connected to
the word parthenogenesis; as in Hindu Kaumari, it represents the autonomy of
the feminine principle, not sexual repression.
Last year I witnessed the unveiling of the Black Madonna of Jasna
Gora, Częstochowa; my Polish friend Marzenna told me the meaning of her name–
often hidden one. She remains hidden
within patriarchal monotheisms; it is internalized patriarchy even within women
that is now forcing her to reemerge. Sue
Monk Kidd who wrote about her awakening in The
Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to
the Sacred Feminine acknowledged how the word goddess created anxiety in
her. She and many others are now “redeeming
the snake” in their psyches because “Eden is a wounded geography within women’s
lives.” My friend Suzanne Ironbiter has written about her encounter in her book
Devi: Mother of My Mind. China Galland wrote how dark and female Kali
had “turned her Catholic upbringing inside out” and how “the darkness of these
female gods comforted” her. “It felt
like a balm on the wound of the unending white maleness that we had deified in
the West.”
And yet, there have always been ‘holy fools’ within
Christianity. Mystics such as Saint
Francis, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila could not
really be contained by the institutional system. Accused of heresy, Meister
Eckhart when asked what God is doing in heaven had answered: “He has been
giving his Son birth eternally, is giving him birth now and will go on giving
him birth forever. The Father being in labor, as a woman giving birth to a
child, in every virtuous soul.” Today his namesake and wildly popular Eckhart
Tolle is called by some a “looney feminist” because he gives primacy to the
feminine principle and even dares to say that gay people’s “uncertainty about
their sexuality” may force them “to dis-identify from socially conditioned patterns
of thought.”
In India the veiled Madonna cohabits with many goddesses; oral
tales of resurrected Jesus visiting there with Mary Magdalene abound, and there
is even a tomb of Issa in Kashmir. Some
of you may like my friend Jayana or Jay Clark’s intriguing book about Jesus and
Mary Magdalene in India called The Ultimate
Love Story. Oral traditions speak of
many mystical tales of St Thomas who brought Christianity to the shores of Kali
saturated Kerala. It must be remembered though
that Eastern, Russian, Coptic, and other Orthodox traditions or Syrian Christianity
in India, although colored by Christianity’s imperial history, do not embrace aggressive proselytizing
ideologies. But Western Catholicism that
wants to “harvest souls” and very wealthy American Evangelism out to convert
the world by hook or by crook can be dangerous power mongering systems.
My Vajrayana Buddhist and Shakta tantric guru, Kulavadhuta
Satpurananda who is also a Sufi and an initiated master in Gnostic Christianity
speaks of the mystic chalices and Mother Teresa’s practices in Dakshineswar,
the haunt of Kali lover Ramakrishna. For
tantrikas that permeate all the dharma traditions, the shunya and purna,
emptiness and plenitude, merge in Kali whom I have described as ‘pregnant
nothingness’. It is no accident that Gnostic Teresa chose Kolkata as her
abode. Khepababa also speaks of the
basil plant (we call tulsi in India) found at the spot of Christ’s resurrection
and therefore the name Basilica. And
this Christmas in case you are drinking Chartreuse liquor, made by Carthusian
monks, Baba says, pay close attention to its history. The Black Madonna may speak to
you in ways you may not anticipate.
Mother Principle is not necessarily about women who may or
may not want to be mothers, and there are enough messed up mothers who fail to
nurture their wanted or unwanted babies.
But collectively women inhabit the mystery of interiority we call Shakti
in India. The Great Mother, at once One
and Many, also presides over all diversity of life and resists homogeneity. This Christmas and New Year let us remember
all the ‘laboring’ bodies of both men and women. Perhaps in this coming time, the psychic
trauma of sexism and racism that creates what Eckhart Tolle calls our ‘pain body’
will be purged. May we descend into the mystic
body and become conscious of our subliminal psyches so that we can stop
consuming ourselves and the earth’s limited resources. Or the cycle of violence
will continue as children will inherit the suffering. This is my punk prayer to
the Black Madonna for helping us face and dissolve all those pain bodies as we
usher in a new dawn around the world in 2014.
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