Product Description: It is not easy to answer the question of what the Black Madonna actually represents. One answer leads to more questions, which, in turn, demand more explanations. Still, she reflects herself in our personal and collective lives and gives intimations of her most essential meaning through images, myths, dreams, and fantasies...read more

Product Description: Jean Hani, professor emeritus at the University of Amiens-where he taught Greek civilization and literature-has long labored to recover and illuminate various aspects of Christianity. His findings have been presented in several works: The Symbolism of the Christian Temple, The Divine Liturgy, and God and the Crafts (also published by Sophia Perennis), as well as Aperçus sur la Messe, La Royauté, Du Pharaon au Roi Très Chrétien, and a collection of articles entitled Mythes, Rites et Symboles...read more

The author describes her spiritual odyssey while investigating--in the U.S., Europe, India, and elsewhere--the spiritual traditions of the Black Madonna that have been popular as cross-cultural expressions of the feminine divine in both Eastern religions and in European Catholicism. Reissue.

Why are over 400 of the world's images for the madonna "black" or "dark"? Why are they so little known? "The Cult of the Black Virgin" investigates the pagan origins of the phenomenon as well as the heretical Gnostic-Christian underground stream which flowed West with the cult of Mary Magdalene and resurfaced in catharism at the time of the crusades. A resurfacing of the powerful pagan goddesses of sexuality, the underworld and earth wisdom, the black virgins are symbols of power and majesty- the other aspect of the traditional madonna's maidenhood or tender maternity. They personify the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant in a quest for lost feminine wisdom and the search for soul. This comprehensive gazetteer enables the reader to locate the sites where black virgins can be found and provides information about their origins.

The author describes her spiritual odyssey while investigating--in the U.S., Europe, India, and elsewhere--the black images that have been tradition in Eastern religions and in European Catholicism