Category: twelvedaysofmary

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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