The Black Madonna of Loreto

UPON a hill near the shore of the Adriatic stands the little village of Loreto, the resort of half a million of pilgrims every year, who go there to visit the Casa Santa, the house of the Virgin at Nazareth. It is said to have been miraculously transported to Loreto by angels, where a church was built over it, adorned by various Popes, and the “ holy house ” itself was surrounded by a lofty marble screen, designed by Bramante, and executed by some of the greatest masters of his day. In a niche of the interior is a small representation of the Virgin and Child in cedar, painted black, and attributed to St. Luke. It is richly ornamented with jewels, which sparkle in the light of ever-burning silver lamps. On the 10th of February, 1797, it was carried off to Paris by the French, but was restored to its shrine on the 9th of December in 1802. In the gorgeous Borghese chapel of Sta. Maria Maggiore at Rome, there is a picture of a black Madonna, also said to have been painted by St. Luke, which was carried in many solemn processions through the city as early as the year 590. These are but two of many such pictures to be found all over Europe, and in the Netherlands there is even said to be a church dedicated to la Vièrge voire. This peculiar representation of the Madonna occurred so often in ancient art that some of the early writers of the Church felt obliged to account for it by explaining that the Virgin was of a very dark complexion, as might be proved by the verse of Canticles which says, “ I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.” Others maintained that she became black during her sojourn in Egypt. Nevertheless, this blackness, though considered to enhance the sanctity of the ancient pictures, was never imitated by more modern painters, and the priests of to-day will tell you that extreme age and exposure to the smoke of countless altar-candles have caused that change in complexion which the more naive fathers of the Church attributed to the power of the Egyptian sun. This explanation is not a satisfactory one, however, because in nearly all these pictures it is the flesh alone that is entirely black, the crimson of the lips, the white of the eyes, and the draperies having preserved their original brilliancy of tint.

It is to the pagan mythologies that we must look for the true explanation, and even the conservative Mrs. Jameson confesses that “ the earliest effigies of the Virgin and Child may be traced to Alexandria, and to Egyptian influences and it is as easily conceivable that the time-consecrated Egyptian myth of Isis and Horus may have suggested the original type, the outward form, and the arrangement of the maternal group as that the classical Greek types of the Orpheus and Apollo should have furnished the early symbols of the Redeemer as the Good Shepherd, — a fact which does not rest upon supposition, but of which the proofs remain to us in the antique Christian sculptures and the paintings in the Catacombs.” Mrs. Jameson accepts the theory that a pagan symbol was adopted for the expression of Christian thought, but many Romanists would go further than this, and maintain with the Marquis de Mirville in his Archéologie de la Vièrge that “as the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri and cylinders, hardly posterior to the Deluge, it seems impossible to deny the existence of a first, ante-historical (Roman) Catholicism, of which our own is the faithful continuation.”

This is a matter of opinion. As a matter of fact, we must remember that the worship of Mary as the mother of God by the Church generally did not begin till the fourth century. In 431, Nestorius and his sect were condemned as heretics by the first Council of Ephesus, for maintaining that in Christ the two natures of God and man remained separate, and that Mary, his human mother, was parent of the man, but not of the God ; consequently, that the title which during the previous century had been popularly applied to her (Theotokos, mother of God) was improper and profane. Cyril and his party held that the two natures were made one, and that therefore Mary was truly the mother of God. The decision of the Council, condemning Nestorius, gave the first great impulse to the worship of Mary, and the subsequent multiplication of the pictures of the Madonna and Child.

The first historical mention of a direct worship of the Virgin occurs in a passage in the works of Eusebius, in the fourth century. Having occasion to enumerate the eighty-four heresies which had already sprung up in the Church, he instances a sect of women who had come from Thrace into Arabia, and who offered cakes of meal and honey to the Virgin, transferring to her the worship that had been paid to Ceres. They were called Collyridians, from collyris, the name of the twisted cake used in their offerings. Here we have the first link between the new faith and the old ; for every one knows that the policy of the Church from the beginning has always been to give to the old symbols a new meaning, to the old festivals a new significance, to the old places a new sanctity, and where dates were wanting to supply them from the chronology of the older religions. So that primitive Christianity, while founding its churches upon the ruins of Mithraic temples, filled up the missing dates in the Scriptural narratives from the pagan chronology which was based upon the history of the sun.

If we take the chronology of the life of the Virgin, for instance, we find the 8th of September set down in the calendar as her birthday. Now the 8th of September in the Roman calendar was the birthday of the virgin Astræa, and signified the disengagement of the celestial Virgo from the solar rays. It is a well-known fact that the 25th of December was appointed by the Western Church to be celebrated as the birthday of Christ no earlier than the fourth century, while a century previous that day had been engrafted into the Roman calendar as the Natalis Solis Invicti, being the feast of the Sun at Tyre, and the feast of Mithra in Persia. Albertos Magnus says that the sign of the celestial Virgo rises above the horizon at the time fixed as the birth of Christ. More than a hundred years before the Christian era, in the territory of Chartres, among the Gauls, honors were paid to the Virgini Parituræ, who was about to give birth to the God of Light.

Th 2d of February, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, is called in the English Church Candlemas, and was originally celebrated at Sais in Egypt as the feast of Lights, in honor of Ceres (or Isis), the mother of the Sun. The celestial sign of the Virgin and Child was in existence many thousand years before Christ. Upon the front of the temple of Sais, under the well-known inscription to Isis, was another, which read, “ The fruit which I have brought forth is the Sun.” The mysteries of Ceres represented Proserpine, her daughter, as carried away by Pluto to the realms of the dead, where Ceres finds her installed as Queen of Darkness. Proserpine, Madonna, and the celestial Virgo are all often depicted as carrying ears of corn or wheat. Albumazar, the Arabian philosopher, says : “ In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called in Arabic Aderenosa, that is, the Immaculate Virgin, holding two ears of wheat, sitting on a throne, and nursing a boy called Jessus by certain nations, Christ in Greek.” Now the Milky Way (so called by the Greeks, who, as usual, invented a story to account for the name) was originally called the Strawy Way; the celestial Virgin, pursued by Typhon, having let fall some of the wheat she carried.

Lady-Day, or the feast of the Annunciation, is celebrated on the 25th of March. In the Roman calendar that day was consecrated to Cybele, the mother of the gods, and was called Hilaria, to testify the joy of the people at the arrival of the vernal equinox. On the same day the Phrygians worshiped Atys (the feminine personification of Bacchus), whom they called the mother of God. The Pamylia (a Coptic word for annunciation) were on the 25th of the month Phameoth, and on the new moon of that month the ancient Egyptians celebrated the union of Isis and Osiris. Nine months afterwards (December 25th) they celebrated the birth of Harpocrates, and one meaning of Harpocrates was “the sun in winter.”

The Assumption of the Virgin is set for the 15th of August. This day is marked in the Roman calendar of Columella as that of the death or disappearance of Virgo. “About the eighth month, when the sun is in his greatest strength, the celestial Virgin seems to be absorbed in his fires, and she disappears in the rays and glory of her son.” The calendar above quoted says that the sun passes into Virgo the 13th before the kalends of September. The Christian festival of the Assumption, or the reunion of the Virgin with her Son, used to be called “ the feast of the passage of the Virgin.”

The mother of the Virgin Mary, we are told, was St. Anna. The Romans had a festival at the beginning of the year for Anna Perenna, and the Hindu goddess Anaitia, the wife of Siva, is also called Annapurna and Kanya the Virgin, while the Roman Catholic Church to-day teaches the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary herself. The name Anna is said to come from the Chaldean ana, heaven.

Isis Multimammia (identical with the Diana of Ephesus), Cybele, Ceres, and many others, being all forms of the same idea, were each in turn addressed as “Queen of Heaven ” and “ Mother of God.” From Rome to Greece, from Greece to Egypt, from Egypt to India, wo may trace the figure of the Virgin and Child, and under every phase we find it, in its exoteric aspect, corresponding to the astronomical symbol of the celestial Virgo, the mother of the God of Light, the Sun.

So much for the form of the representation ; now for the color. Were the black Madonna of Loreto and numerous others of the same hue so colored as the mere fantasy of some early painter, or can we trace that symbolism also to its source? We find in all the histories of mythology many instances where both gods and goddesses are represented as black. Pausanias, who mentions two statues of the black Venus, says that the oldest statue of Ceres among the Phigalenses was black. Now Ceres, like Juno and Minerva, like the Hindu Maia and the Egyptian Isis, stood for the maternal principle in the Universe, and all these goddesses have been thus represented. Ceres is the same as Here (Juno), and Here became in German Hertha, or the mother Earth. In the different Greek dialects, Here took various forms, and changed into Ere, Re, Ree, Rhea, and Res, all names of the earth. In Latin Res was retained, to signify matter (or mater), the mother of all things, and, figuratively, every quality and modification thereof. Minerva Aglaurus, the daughter of Cecrops, another similar personification, was represented at Athens as black. Corinth had a black Venus, so had the Thespians. The oracles of Dodona and Delphi were founded by black doves, the emissaries of Venus. The Isis Multimammia in the Capitol at Rome is black.

Nor is it the goddesses alone who are shown to be of this sable hue. In all the myths connected with light, or with the sun and moon, the sex is ever changing, and the moon becomes masculine or the sun feminine, or the two sexes are blended into one, as the allegory varies. Bacchus, Hercules, and Apollo have all been worshiped under a feminine form, and their statues have all been carved from black marble. Several black figures of Cybele have their pedestals inscribed with “ Mother of the Gods ” or “Mother of the Sun.” Isis and Horus, the Egyptian form of the Mother and Child, are continually represented as black. Christna was worshiped as a black god in Egypt, under the name of Kneph or Knuphis. Eusebius speaks of the Demiurgos Kneph, who was represented as dark blue or black. It was formerly supposed that many of these old statues were made of a dark-blue stone because black could not be procured; but it is now said that in the mystic language of colors dark blue and black had the same significance, and were therefore used indifferently. Now dark blue melting into black is the color of the sky at midnight, especially in southern countries, where the velvety blueness of the heavens is very striking; and here, it seems to me, we may find the clue to the indiscriminate use of these colors. The worshipers of the Sun, in the tropical climates where that worship began, observed that his destructive power was exerted most by day, when his fierce rays tortured men and animals, dried up rivers, and generated putrefaction and disease ; while by night fell the vivifying dews, tempered by the warm air. They worshiped the nocturnal sun, therefore, as the productive power or maternal element, and the deity that symbolized it, whether Apollo Didymæus, Bacchus, or Hercules, took on, for the time being, a feminine shape and attributes. Night itself was personified as the Universal Mother in the person of Hathor, or the Isis of the lower world, often represented as suckling Horus. On a monolith from Karnac, now in the British Museum, Hathor has inscribed on her throne “ The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven ;" also “ The Morning Star ” and “ The Light of the Sea.”

Black, then, we see to be the symbol of the productive power of night, and of that Darkness from whose bosom springs the Sun ; and this color, as chosen for the old statues and paintings of the Divine Mother, simply intensified the idea of maternity that the artist desired to express. But underlying the astronomical symbol was always a deeper esoteric significance, known only to the priests and initiates ; and the further back we go in the study of the ancient faiths and their symbols, the more complete become the resemblances between them, until we are forced to conclude that the primitive religions had but one fountainhead. No matter how complicated the systems of polytheism may be, we find that they resolve themselves, under the microscope of comparative mythology into a few simple allegories that in the beginning expressed one and the same idea. In religion the same law of progression must obtain that holds good in every other department of human thought and science, — the universal order of development from the simple to the complex. The conception of an ineffable mysterious Power behind every manifestation in nature, Unnamable, Absolute, and Unique, must have preceded, for the priests at least, the elaborate systems of Egypt and of Greece that appointed to every phase of physical being its appropriate deity. For as far back as we can trace any religious organization, there is always the symbolism for the people, the hidden meaning thereof for the priests; and this hidden meaning, so far as we are able to catch glimpses of it here and there, seems to be always the same.

Back of the black Madonna, then, the copy of the black goddesses of the earlier faiths ; back of the blackness of night, symbol of the darkness from which is born the sun, we find a deeper symbolism still. In Lenormant’s Beginnings of History, he tells us that upon one of the earliest Chaldean tablets deciphered by the famous scholar, George Smith, is the following inscription: “ When above the heavens were not yet named, and below the earth was without a name, the limitless Abyss was their generator, and the chaotic Sea she who produced the whole.” Among the teachings said to have been given to Pythagoras by the Chaldeans, we find the conception of the Absolute, the Eternal Cause, manifesting itself as Father and Mother in one, — the father light, the mother darkness; to light belonging heat and dryness, to darkness cold and moisture. “There are these two divinities of the universe: the chthonian (water), producing all that is born of earth, and the celestial (fire), sharing the nature of the air ; ” and it is from these two in one that proceeds the creative principle, the Logos, or Word.

So in Genesis we read : “ Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” And in the Gospel of St.John: “The Word was in the beginning with God ” (as the second person of the mystic Trinity). “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made.”

The basic idea of the productive power of Nature, giving birth to all things without change in herself, underlies every conception of the Virgin Mother; and behind the earthly form of Mary, the mother of Jesus, we can trace the grand, mysterious outlines of the Universal Mother, that Darkness from whence cometh the Light, that chaotic Sea that produceth all things. Water, as referred to in such allegories, is, of course, something quite different from the element we know, and represents that primordial matter whose protean shape so constantly eludes the grasp of science.

Representing the productive power of Nature as darkness, therefore, the old gods and goddesses were made black, and the Virgin Mother of the early Christian Church was painted of the same color for the same reason. When water was the symbol, water (or moisture) in combination with fire (or heat), then the lotus, offspring of heat and moisture, floating upon the surface of the waves, became identified with the maternal element; and the celestial messenger who announced to Maia the coming birth of her divine son, Gautama Buddha, bore in his hand the sacred lotus, transformed by the Christian Church into the lily of the Annunciation. So the Hathor of the Egyptians, the goddess of the night, on account of this association with water, was called “ the Light of the Sea,” as the Madonna is worshiped as the “Stella del Mare,”and Venus is said to have risen from the foam of the ocean.

In the mystic philosophies, darkness was also used as the symbol of the Infinite Unknown. Light, as we recognize it, being material, could be considered only as the shadow of the divine, the antithesis of spirit, and the SelfExistent, or Light Spiritual, was therefore worshiped as darkness. And water, considered as the source of all things, came to be also the type of wisdom or truth. All symbols depend upon their correlation, and must be interpreted according to the character of their surroundings. The black Madonna of Loreto means to-day a portraiture of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the Protestant; to the Romanist, “ the Daughter, Spouse, and Mother of God ; ” while to the ancients the figure of the black Mother and Child represented the mysterious forces of the universe. Truly, as the cynic philosopher Antisthenes said, nearly five hundred years before Christ, “ the gods of the people are many, but the God of nature is one.”

Katharine Hillard.