Venus as Morning/Madonna & Black Madonna/Evening Star
#hieroshiva
Black Madonna: The Great Work
Exhibition Catalog Essay
By
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
The “fallen woman” is a common occurrence in western religious tradition, yet the descending female figure has barely been examined throughout the history of art. The uproar Frida Kahlo caused in the 20th century with her erotically charged The Suicide of Dorothy Hale revealed the complex dynamism surrounding this archetype that keeps it out of mainstream dialectic —whether in art or our corporate controlled celebrity obsessed culture.
Black Madonna seeks to remedy this imbalance by holding the tension of the long repressed polarity of Venus – as personified in the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the self-declared Queen of Heaven and Earth. The pentagram has long been associated with the love planet due to its perfectly symmetrical orbit, and this exhibition remakes the symbol from the Christian projection of the devil (lust) to the more ancient figure of Lucifer, the light bearer. This holistic consciousness illuminates the hundred works in this exhibition expressing what is newly emerging in art: the authentic face of the feminine denied by western religion yet embodied in matter through the Great Work of alchemists.
In the legend of the Black Madonna, the Holy Grail (Sangraal) is Mary Magdalene, who carried the bloodline of Jesus to southern France through her womb. The original Grail story of Perceval was written in the Court of Champagne, a cousin and sponsor of Hugues de Payens, co-founder and original Grand Master of the Knights Templars who was related to St. Bernard de Clairvaux, who translated the “sacred geometry of King Solomon’s masons and wrote the Oath of the Knights Templar which venerated Mary Magdalene. (1) While this religious/military order was protecting the pilgrims to the Holy Land and retrieving the treasures hidden within the temple mount, the underground mystery stream bubbled to the surface through the sacred practice of the Cathars in the Languedoc, where Mary Magdalene is traditionally honored as la Dompna del Aquae (“Mistress of the Waters”). (2) Within the confines of secretly held ceremonies, the songs of the troubadours transmitted the collective desire to unite with the Lost Bride through daily acts of chivalry.
If it had been recognized, a messianic lineage carried by the Black Madonna would have subverted the Church doctrine of a celibate Jesus. The Grail mythology was associated with the Merovingian dynasty. Yet had it prevailed, this holy bloodline would have become a direct threat to the Vatican’s imposed tradition in which the subjugation of women was enshrined. Yet, the knowledge of sacred geometry and symbols believed to have been extracted by the Templars from the Ark of the Covenant was imbedded in the very foundation of the gothic cathedrals by guilds of masons such as the “Children of Solomon.” (3)
This is how the tradition of “holy intercourse” took root in the cathedral of Chartres, built on the sacred site where the Druids worshipped the Mother Goddess. In the crypt of this structure is the icon of the Black Virgin about to give birth. This was a symbol of renewal exposed by the Merovingian bloodline that sought to restore the Lost Bride to Christianity. (4) Yet, hopes were dashed when the Cathars were exterminated in 1209. The bloodline fled to protection in Scotland, where the Grail secrets remain guarded in the Rosslyn Chapel awaiting the unveiling for the Age of Aquarius. (5)
Mark Wiener’s singular work, Still Life in Red (2009), encapsulates a quarter century of collective upwelling of the divine feminine in the face of continued subjugation. The red X was the secret esoteric symbol of the heretical church. (6) Today, it represents the erotic repression — academia, on one hand, and the corporate media, on the other. As an early Christian symbol, the X stood for the integration of chalice and blade through the merging of the upper (masculine) and lower (feminine) triangles making up the Seal of Solomon. Black Madonna seeks to transform the X symbol from its current association with repression to the pleasure of “holy intercourse” which entered the gospels as the Song of Songs, which were originally derived from the rites of the Sacred Marriage (hieros gamos) in ancient Sumer. (7)
The artist began The Black Madonna Series with a series of nude photographs in 1982, just as the ancient mystery tradition bubbled to the surface in the renaissance known as the New Age movement. Paradoxically, the rise of feminists in the academy choked the authentic pursuit of pleasure expressed in early feminist art. The void was filled by the manufactured idols of the celebrity entertainment culture. It was as if American institutions conspired to repress the emerging underground stream – and the authentic erotic dynamism between masculine and feminine in its wake!
