Blessings to you and welcome to Day 28 of Walking with Mary 2020
I have resisted the temptation to change the content
of these thirty days too much with each repeat of
Walking with Mary as new people are joining in every time
and they are looking forward to participating in the rituals etc.
As you may or may not know, I have been working on
creating the Mysteries of the Black Madonna tarot deck the past
two years. I have been researching the Black Madonna
for as long as I have researched the divine feminine
and it is a vast field of image and history and wisdom
with so many powerful layers.
Today I am sharing a few of the shrines that I have created
for the tarot deck. I am way over halfway and the Major Arcana
is virtually completed. I do share some of the journey with my patrons
on Patreon and I invite you to have a look.
www.patreon.com/thefrenchmadonna
I also share an extract from a wonderful book with you –
In search of Mary, the woman and the symbol by Sally Cunneen
‘Women in particular have been looking more closely at their own experience
and discovering that the mother of Jesus can be a force to empower them today.
Even the idea of Mary as simple housewife, so uncongenial to me as a young
mother, still provides strength to some American women; being a housewife
is ’emotionally draining work and physically tiring’ addmitted one woman.
Its hard to remember that its service, physical, very direct service to human beings.
Thinking of Mary and how she would have been doing these
exact things helps very much.
Something is clearly going on in the interchange between Mary and women
today that works in two directions : empowering women and at the same time
changing their idea of her.
Mary Gordon claims that it is the ‘impulse to reexamine and to understand
in a deeper way the history of women, female genius,
female work, often anonymous, hidden, uncredited,
to look for the values that are not simply male values dressed for success,
that is leading women back to Mary’.
The Marian teaching that had a negative effect on women’s development
was part of a worldwide pattern in which male experience and
power were accepted as human norms. Such assumptions, of course,
are by no means christian, nor are they inherent in Marian liturgy, art
and devotion. As God-bearer, Mother of Mercy and
Queen of Heaven, Mary has been the carrier of the feminine divine
in Western culture.
https://youtu.be/6IHgCYmH_F8
O bearer of the eternal word, virgin Mary,
what voice, what human tongue can praise you well enough?
Your new star of the sea, window to the lofty heavens,
ladder from earth to heaven, from the lowest to the highest
You conceived eternity, you gave birth to your parent;
the make came from what he made, the creator from the creature.
– O genetrix aeterni
Om jai mata Mary Ma
Om jai om jai om jai
O holy Mother thou who art in Earth and Cosmos
Whole are thy name
Thou who art our daily bread
and the Chalice of bliss
eternally springing from the Sacred Heart within
and flowing in compassion to all that lives
Ave Maria
Ave Ave Ave
Ave Maria
blessings
Hettienne
