Category: guadulupe

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Twelve Days of Mary – Day 5

 Cybele

 She walked with lions and rode astride one and her
priestesses rode in a chariot drawn by lions.  On her throne,
with a cymbal in her hand, she was flanked by lions.
She was the mother goddess of fertility and her special places
were the forests and the mountaintops.  Holding a tambourine
she inspired wild ecstatic dancing.
As Mistress of Animals she was accompanied by lion.
Her lover/son was her priest and one who renounced
the patriarchal world.

The priestesses of Cybele was also called the Sibyls.
Sibilla is the Latin form of the name of Cybele,
Anatolian mother goddess who was brought to Rome in the form
of a black menhir. Cybele’s priestesses used bee honey in sacred rituals;
as prophetesses they foretold that her black stone will be
taken to Rome as a sign of victory and ‘on the fourth day
of April, two hunderd and four years before the time of Christ,
Cybele’s black stone was placed in the Temple of Victory, on the
ancient Palatine of Rome.’ – Ancient mirrors of Womahood – Merlin Stone

Her son and lover Attis, similarly to the story of Mary and Jesus,
was a shepherd and he died beneath an evergreen tree and his image
was hung upon a tree (similarly to a wooden cross)
One can also see the connection between the stories of Isis and
Osiris in Cybele and Attis.

The sanctuary of the Black Virgin of Montevergine
is built on the site of the black Cybele.  Similarly to the worship
of Cybele, Mamma Schaviona is worshipped by the playing
of the tammorriata.
Another of Cybele’s great temples stood on the site of the Vatican where
the St Peter’s Basilica stands today.
According to Barbara G Walker the games that form part
of the sacred rituals of worshipping Cybele, is the origins of the carnivale.

In many Black Madonna traditions the carnivale plays an important part of the
festivities.  Small minority groups, on the fringe of society, takes part in the
carnivale to highlight the truths that no-one wants to face;  through satire, puppets
and vulgar comedy they shine the light on the shadow of our system, culture
and society.  ‘In authentic carnival festivities, carnival turns everything inside out,
bottom to top, front to rear and unveils, unmasks and uncrowns.’  This is evident
in the festivals of the Black Madonna that I attended in both France, Italy and
Belgium. The carnival has at its heart the wish to break up and dismantle
patriarchal social stratification and husbandry.

Today is the fifth day of the Twelve Days of Mary and it also relates to the fifth day of the Epiphany of 30 December.
On our wheel of colour-astro we are dealing the fifth card for



Leo July 23 – August 24
Colour – turquoise
The planet – The Sun
The tarot card – The Holy Child (The Sun)
The fifth house of creativity, self-expression
The fifth chakra of the thymus gland – also called the butterfly chakra
and the spiritual centre of the  High Heart or the Sacred Heart
The colour of the thymus is turquoise, its complementary colour is orande
and its higher spiritual colour is pale coral

The Holy Child in the Mysteries of Mary deck
King of Cups from Nosotras Tarot


This card has bearing on today as well as the the time period of Leo 
for your personal year in 2020
but also to the area of that house, the chakra, the spiritual centre etc.
At the end we will look at and explore all 12 cards, how they support
each other, complement each other and how they will affect your year.

Meditation 

Every living thing is imbued with the Spirit of Love. This one
understanding, held in mass consciousness,
will transform our planet.  Humans and animals
are equal and worthy of respect and the liberty to live.
This understanding, held in mass consciousness,
will transform the planet.
 It will increase and expand its aura
of love to be as brilliant as our sun.
In your mind’s eye see two suns in the heavens.
Two brilliant suns, one above the other.
In your inner heaven the sun’s double will be seen as Mother God
takes Her divine place.  Two suns represent our Father Mother God.
Shining in our heavens they will show us the balance of the
yin and the yang.  The sacred union, the sacred marriage
between the two, will birth the divine child within.
blessings
Hettienne

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Twelve Days of Mary – Day 3

The Black Madonna of Montserrat
Spain
In Christianity the goddess is personified by the Black Madonna  
In Montserrat, in the Middle Ages, the Benedictine monks
saw their craggy mountain, lush with flowers,
as an image of the Virgin herself. 
Referring to this shrine, Marina Warner writes :
‘While Mary provides a focus for the steeliest ascetism, she is also the ultimate
of fertility symbols.  The mountain blossoms spontaneously;
so does the mother maid.
The old significance of the moon and the serpent as divine attributes
survives in such sanctuaries as Montserrat,
for there she is venerated as a source of fertility and delight ….
The Virgin of Montserrat presides especially over marriage and sex,
pregnancy and childbirth 
                                                           – Alone of all her sex

For a woman without a positive mother, this ‘dark’ side of the Virgin
can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a
natural home for the rejected child..  The child born from the rejected side 
of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast
state of Mary. 
The fact is the domestic world alienates her.
She is an outcast, a gypsy.
There is no room for her in the inn.
Saving the abandoned child within her is the woman’s own version
of the Virgin and Divine Child.
Her virgin is the other side of Mary,
‘the ultimate of fertility symbols.’
In loving the abandoned child within herself, 
a woman becomes pregnant with herself.
The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish,
not as the pure biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph,
but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over marriage and sex,
 pregnancy and childbirth. 

                           extract from The Pregnant Virgin by Marion Woodman

Today is the third day of the Twelve Days of Mary and it also relates to the third day of the Epiphany of 28 December.
On our wheel of colour-astro we are dealing the third card for




Gemini  May 22 – June 22
Colour Yellow
The planet Mercury
The tarot card The Lover
The Third house of communications and duality
The solar plexus chakra
complementary colour is violet and third eye chakra
spiritual centre are located in the hands


This card has bearing on  the time period of Gemini for your personal year in 2020
but also to the area of that house, the chakra, the spiritual centre etc.
At the end we will look at and explore all 12 cards.

Meditation

Visualise the hands as centres of healing, peace, love and wisdom.
Be still and listen. Focus on the in and out breath.
Profound peace comes over me in the stillness.
Be still and know that the I Am in you is really the I Am in all.
All is one life, one Spirit, one magnificent AM uniting all, creating
a matrix of divinity.
The I Am of each one is the I Am of Me.
All is in Me and I AM in all.
My body is in your body and your body is in my body.
My soul is in your soul as divine love, will and wisdom.
I am a channel of my greater divine self and through my hands
I create beauty and healing and communicate 
acceptance and compassion.
I am here as I am required to express my soul and her creativity
into this world.
blessings
Hettienne


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Twelve Days with Mary – Day 2

‘There is in God, some say
A deep but dazzling darkness*

…..It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
After the sun’s remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

O holy Hope! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show’d them me
To kindle my cold love.

Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust
Could man outlook that mark! ……
If a star were confin’d into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere.

Extracts from the poems of Henry Vaughan
*The Night
They have all gone into the Light
The Black Madonna and the Black Goddess is symbolic of the dark night
of the soul.  She can be seen as the alchemical stage of ‘nigredo’, the blackness
through which our soul substance is tempered and transformed.
Most traditions have a dark-night spirituality and the worship of the Black Madonna
is across all continents and all cultures.  In the Catholic tradition there is a powerful
meditation called ‘The Cloud of Unknowing.’  In this meditation one
enters the path of unknowing and undoing, darkness and uncertainty.
And yet, the experience gained on any ‘dark-night of the soul’ tradition
is one of illumination and enlightenment.
When we enter the womb of the Black Madonna we enter the
passage of rebirth and She reflects the light in the darkness to us
as a glittering jewel.
When I created the shrine of  the Virgin of Guadulupe
in her sanctuary, the monastery of Guadalupe, near Cáceres, Extremadura in Spain
these images came to me
She is known as
Patronness of Extremadura
Queen of Hispanics
Our Lady of Silence
and reputed to be the first Guadulupe and that the famous
Virgen de Guadulupe of Mexico may or may not be a copy
of her or at least that these two melded into one.

Today is the second day of the Twelve Days of Mary and it also relates to the second day of the Epiphany of 27 December.
On our wheel of colour-astro we are dealing the second card for




Taurus (April 21 – May 22)
Colour orange
The planet Venus
The tarot card The Hierophant of the Mysteries
the second house of beauty and wealth
the sacral chakra; (orange)
and the spiritual center of the throat and the colour blue

The colour of the sacral is Orange , its complementary colour is violet
and its higher spiritual colour is blue

This card has bearing on  the time period of Taurus for your personal year in 2020
but also to the area of that house, the chakra, the spiritual centre etc.
At the end we will look at and explore all 12 cards.



If you have placed your 12 cards onto your wheel, turn over
the second card.
How does this card act as Hierophant of the Mysteries in your soul and psyche?

Meditation and contemplation on the second chakra (sacral)
and its higher spiritual centre (throat)

Love is sent forth from our being through our womb, our heart and
our words.  Love is the well from which all life springs forth.
It is the primal matter of the universe.  It lives within us within
the seed atom of perfection.  When we speak, our words carry our
inner light, love and power.  Light comes from within and darkness
precede the light.  We must have one with the other to truly know
and become Love.
blessings
Hettienne
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Celebrating Twelve Days with Mary – Day 1

 

The yellow flower blossoms

She’s our mother

The goddess on the barrel cactus

is our mother

The obsidian butterfly

She our mother

She goddess of the earth

A deer’s what she’s become

There on the desert plain

– Song of “Teteo Innan’, Father Fray Bernadino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex


Song of Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess, translated by the Franciscan Fray Sahagun.


Tonantzin was revered in the same location where the Virgin of Guadulupe’s apparitions took place in 1531 and where the Basilica of Virgin de Guadulupe stands today.Tonantzin has been translated as ‘Mother of the gods’ or ‘Our Mother’ by Sahagun. The goddess Tonantzin demanded human sacrifice and the Council of Lima in 1552 ordered that all trace of her be destroyed. However, Tonantzin did not disappear; She was integrated or absorbed into the Virgen of Guadulupe
Unlike the blue cloak of many of Virgen Mary’s images, Guadulupe is recognized by her turquoise-green cloak and red dress. In Aztec mythology turqouise is the sacred colour of the earth as well as the moon mother goddess Tlazolteotl; the water and fertility goddess Chalchutlicue (The One with a skirt of green stones) and the fire and war god of the south, Huitzilopochtli. ‘The god was believed to be ‘immaculately’ conceived with a feather by his mother, the goddess Coalicue (Lady of the Serpent Skirt) – extracted from the book The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe by Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba.
May she forge open
our hearts

so that we are
free to love and
embrace allLa Nuestra Senora,
Sacred Woman

Twelve Days with Mary has been happening on my blogCloister of the Heartt
since 2010 when I
first joined up with Rebecca of
Visit her blog to read her story and the posts of other Mary lovers.
For these twelve days I will be celebrating and sharing with you, the stories
of the dark
skinned Lady of Love and it will culminate on 12 December
on the feast day
of the Virgin of Guadulupe;
known in Spanish
as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
and Virgen de
Guadulupe.
I invite you to
walk with us here and on Instagram
@thefrenchmadonna
and @walkingwithmary with the hashtags #walkingwithmary and #twelvedaysofmary #twelvedaysofmarylove.

My Twelve Days with Mary Love has always centred around art and sacred artmaking. This year I hope to convey, through my sacred artmaking ofthe Mysteries of the Black Madonna deck, a sisterhood of dark Latin madonnas, black African goddesses and the dark virgins and mothers of Europe.

For these twelve days I invite you to create a special Guadulupe altar and you may want to start your inner pilgrimage with a puja to Our Lady of Guadulupe and the Black Madonna. For those who are new here, you will find all instructions on my blog here.

I have included all the Black Madonna cards from the Mysteries of Mary deck on my altar and an offering of a round loaf of bread
For these Twelve Days of Mary Love I will share with you my system 
of accessing your Council of Twelve, incorporating
colour healing through the 12 houses of the astrological wheel and the tarot deck. The other exciting news is that the 12 house astro-tarot-colour spread that we will work with for these 12 days will be expanded in posts during 2020 on Patreon.

This chart shows the 12 colours linked to the 12 houses. They are also linked to the astrological sign of each house plus the chakras in the physical aura, as well as the higher centres in the spiritual body, i.e. the spiritual centres. Each one is linked to an archetype, a tarot card, a challenge or ‘dragon’, an archangel, a month of the year, the twelve days of the Epiphany, etc etc. I will share one on each of the twelve days.


Each house is related to an area of your life. You may already have your own take on this or otherwise you will find loads of information on the internet. To start off I kept it simple. I use my oracle set to indicate what each house means to me personally, just as a keyword for now.
We are doing a 12 card spread for these 12 days. In this spread each card represents the house and area of your life, as well as the month of 2020 and the chakra as well as spiritual centre that it will affect throughout the year. It can become quite a layered reading as time goes on, so I suggest that you keep a journal.
Shuffle your deck and place 12 cards in a circle starting with the first house and moving around anti-clockwise to the second house and ending with the twelfth house.
You can keep the cards face down and turn the applicable one over each day.


Today is the first day of the Twelve Days of Mary and it also relates to the first day of the Epiphany of 26 December.
The first card represents Aries (March 20 – April 21); 
The planet Mars;
The tarot card Emperor or The Good Father
the first house of ‘self’; or soul and life purpose
the root chakra;
and the spiritual center of the ‘head’

The colour of the root is RED, its complementary colour is GREEN
and its higher spiritual colour is WHITE

This card has bearing on  the time period of Aries for your personal year in 2020
but also to the area of that house, the chakra, the spiritual centre etc.
At the end we will look at and explore all 12 cards.

Today :


Add red to your altar, yellow flowers if you can;

small seeds, grains or corn symbolically seeding

insight and clarity over the next 12 days and 12 months


Give the The Good Father a voice in your day and heart;

what does he have to say?

We will uncover his place in your Council of 12 and his relationship
to your other Archetypes.

Place your twelve cards in their places on your Council of 12

Turn over the first card

I will share with you my own cards and how I read these in the next 11 posts.
p.s.  If you are creating a journal then start with House 9 of Sagittarius (the white)
and white is the higher spiritual colour of the Root chakra

This way you can keep your circle going year after year by merely doing a new draw

Meditation and contemplation on the first chakra (root)
and its higher spiritual centre (head)

Behold! with my senses I make all things new. With my imagination I see within my mind’s eye. With my creative power, my feelings and devotion, my creation is born into this world for the highest good of all. In the mind all things are possible. With the word behold! we invoke what is to be. We set in motion our life around us. Our thoughts take shape and all comes into us as we see it. We think and behold a concept, then all of nature follows through. With our mind together, we can create peace in the world, a new world of harmony and love, By seeing the sacred in everything there will be heaven on Earth.

So be it.
 blessings
 Hettienne