THE LADY AND THE CAVE
Reflections on the meaning of the Black Madonna
Jyoti Sahi

Introduction
In our effort to search for the face of Christ, as he might appear in the Indian context, it is   necessary to imagine what the Mother of Christ looked like, as it is the belief of many Christians that it is from her that Jesus derived his humanity. The image of a “Virgin Mother” is universal, and we could also find in this archetypal figure a distinctly feminine notion of space, having its own autonomy and integrity. This image is also associated with a cosmology which believes that it is from this space that light is born. Mircea Eliade, in an essay entitled “Spirit, Light and Seed”E1 outlines ancient symbols which relate to the cosmic genesis of light into a primal material universe whose energy first manifests itself in what we call darkness. I would like to explore in this essay how this image of light emerging out of the darkness might illumine an understanding of the whole birthing process. In exploring this world of myth and symbol we encounter a web of narratives, which appear to flow from the source of language, as expressive of the very genesis of perception. This essay is only a step in this direction of going beyond the veil of images, to discover a room that lies beyond what we can consciously describe, or logically explain: a room in which we sense a mystery that words evoke, but can never define.

Light and Space in the Tribal tradition of the Khasis in Meghalaya.
    The Khasi tribes of North East India, which inhabit the high lands of Meghalaya between the Assam valley and the plains of Bengal, have traditionally been matri-lineal in their social organization. This has meant that in their most primal myths, we find the figure of a Divine Feminine force, often associated with the earth, but also an all embracing figure, in which the heavens, and the motion of the stars, and the cyclical journey of the sun, is also contained.
Among the Khasis, there is a myth about the lady of the Sun, who hid herself in a cave, which is related to what was called the tree of darkness. There was a grand assembly of all the creatures who needed to find a way of bringing her out of the cave, and various birds were requested to go and persuade the lady of the cave to emerge from the mountain of darkness.  There was the famous Horn Bill, whose striking black and white feathers are much prized in the North East as a ceremonial decoration for heroes, but this bird is associated with both prejudice and pride, and so was rejected by the lady of the cave, who threw her stool at him, which is why he has permanently an ugly protuberance attached to his bill. The peacock, for all its splendour, was no more successful, because the lady of the cave said that he was more interested in his tail, than in her. Finally it was the humble jungle fowl who won the lady’s heart, and she agreed, after he had crowed three times at the entrance to her cave, to emerge from the darkness, and to give her light to the world. It is for this reason that the cock crows every morning before the dawn, and the story linking the cock to the dawn is found in many folk tales all over the world.E2
It is interesting to reflect on the relation of this feminine figure to the cave, and how it helps us to understand certain processes, which are to be found in all cultures. The cave is a dark space; a space that does not lie outside, but rather at the very heart of what we might call material reality.E3  The cave has been associated with various cavities in the human body, like the mouth, the heart, or the womb.  It is both dangerous, and protective. Probably the cave has provided communities with shelter from pre-historic times. The Khasi hills are full of caves, and there are other myths, concerning the caves that run into the stony depths of this very ancient land-mass of volcanic matter. The caves are associated with iron ore, and are used for searching the deep treasures of the underworld. The monster Thlen, who is described both as a serpent monster, and also a bird of prey, is believed to inhabit these caves, which we find in the Cheerapunji area on the borders of the plains of Bangladesh.E4  In a way we can relate the symbol of the cave, with the beginnings of what we call culture. In the ancient Rig Vedic myth of the “Cows of the Dawn” we are told of how the cattle of Indra, the god of the skies, and also rain, were stolen by the Panis, an ancient tribe who were associated with miserliness (the term Baniya, comes from the trading skills of the Pani tribes) who hid the cows in the cave. It was only through the cunning female dog Sarama, that the cattle were discovered, and released after a mighty battle, in which the Lord of the Skies broke open the cave with his weapon, the thunderbolt, and released the precious cows who came out of the cave like the many coloured rays of the sun at dawn. The Sanskritic term for cow is Go, which means also light. The early culture of the wandering nomadic tribes who came into north India, was based on cattle breeding. Cattle provided all the most precious products such as milk, butter, oil, fuel,(in the form of cow dung),  hides, and even meat. The link between these animals and a feminine force, on which the whole community depended for its survival, is an important aspect of the myth. Later, in the struggle between the followers of the Sky god Indra, and the indigenous peoples for whom the dark deity of Krishna the cow herd was more important, Krishna escorts the cow girls and their cattle to shelter in a cave. This cave he creates by lifting up a whole mountain with his finger. There the whole village community is able to avoid the terrible downpour of rain, which threatened to inundate the face of the earth.E5
     In the primordial struggle between sky gods, and the chthonic forces of the earth, and underworld, the cave represents a meeting of two concepts of space. It is dark, but it is like a sky, which has been absorbed or buried into the earth. Indian metaphors for the heart and also the womb, speak of an “antara-akash”, a sky that is within. The image of the sky is one of openness, boundless space, which implies a kind of freedom. The cave, on the other hand, is a different concept of space, which is enclosed, and therefore in some way confining, impossible to escape. The word ‘KA’ which in Sanskrit comes from a question: “What?” is both the cave, zero, but also the golden egg, or ‘hiranya garbha’ which is an image of the sun. The egg is a cave in which the fledgling bird is contained outside the body of the mother bird. The link between the cave and the egg is another connection between the earth and the sky.E6
The birds that came to call the lady of the cave from the womb of the earth, also represent the meeting of the sky and the earth. The black and white feathers of the hornbill symbolize the meeting of light and darkness. The peacock too, from ancient times is represented as carrying the image of its young in a cave within its own body. It is associated with the waters, and with snakes, which are also creatures of the underworld. The jungle fowl, according to the Khasi legend, was at first too shy to come and attend the gathering of the creatures, because as an egg, it felt naked, defenceless. It was scolded for not answering to the call of the assembled clans of creatures, but tried to excuse itself by saying that it felt ashamed to come, because it had no clothes to wear. Then all the creatures came together to weave it various clothes, so that the feathers of the cock are supposed to be the gift of many elements, which we find in nature. It was only in this capacity, as a bird of the earth, which is not even very good at flying, and whose garment is the combined gift of all earth bound creatures, that it was able to persuade the lady of the cave to come out of her egg, which was the cave of darkness, thus bringing the gift of light to the earth.

The figure of the Black Madonna in the Christian tradition.
Some years ago I was asked to make an image of the “Dalit ki Mata”, or the Mother of the Dalits. The word Dalit, coming from Dal, meaning the earth, or that which is broken, crushed, made me think of this image of the cave. Could the Mother of the Dalits, be this primodial figure of the woman in the cave? But then what would this woman look like ? Traditionally she has been pictured as dark skinned, as in the figure of the “Black Madonna” who was definitely a representation of “Our Lady of the Rocks”, who perhaps was in ancient times worshipped in dark caves, where she was associated with the chthonic forces of the underworld. In a meeting of the Abhishiktananda society in December 1993 to commemorate the death anniversary of Swamy Abhishiktananda, the theme of “Pneuma and Shakti” was taken, because this was a very important concern of Abhishiktananda especially towards the end of his life. He had often returned to reflect on the significance of the Black Madonna, coming as he did from the South of France, with his roots in the Breton world, which has from ancient times had a special concern for this devotion to Mary as the Mother of the rocks. Present at the meeting was Dr. Cornelia Vogelsanger, who had just come from organizing a large exhibition of  “Kali and the Black Madonna” in the ethnographic museum of Zurich.  It was in the same year (1993) that Fr. Bede Griffiths also passed away, and I learnt from those who were close to him in the last months of his life, that he often recalled the figure of the Black Madonna to whom he repeatedly turned in his suffering.  For both these Benedictine monks, who represented in many ways a Celtic tradition within Britain and France, coming to India was part of a personal journey of re-discovering not only their pre-Christian roots, but also the feminine dimension of their Faith.  Dom Bede was to write of the “Marriage of East and West”, which was also an inner process of integrating the rational and discursive approach to religion, with a more intuitive, and contemplative dimension.
Later, in 1995 I met China Galland in California, who had written a book about her own search for the Black Madonna through an encounter with Tara in the Buddhist tradition.E7  Subsequently, I tried to pursue this link between the image of the Black Madonna and the Tara figure, who is such a central figure both in Buddhist Mahayana iconography and North Indian Shaivism. There is a kind of proto-Tara in the tribal tradition of the Konds in Orissa. For them Tari is the feminine creator, who made all the world as we find it on this planet earth, out of a great lump of clay. But when the Father Creator, whom they call Bura, came to see what she had done, he was very scornful. He told her that he would show her how she should really create what is perfect. Then, out of the clay he fashioned the first tribal human beings, ancestors of the Konds. But having made these creatures, he walked away, and was not seen again on earth. Tari was very angry and hurt about the implied criticism of the Father god, and was determined to teach his creatures a lesson. Tari made the different creatures of nature, which were her handiwork, act against the primal tribals, so that the different elements were a torment to them; the earth shook, sickness afflicted them, and creatures like the tiger, snake, elephant and so forth which inhabit the jungles, attacked them. Then in their suffering, one day the first Kond woman was preparing a vegetable to eat, and in the process of cutting it up, she accidentally cut her own finger. Then the blood flowed, and where her blood fell, there the earth was pacified. Tari appeared to her, and said that she would accept the human creatures, if they offered her sacrifice that contained blood. It was for this reason that the Konds became the “priests of the earth”, and learnt to sacrifice to the Mother goddess.E8 As a strange corollary to this myth, Barbara Boal, in her fascinating study of the Konds, remarks that when the first Christian Missionaries came to the Phool Bani area in the 19th century, and introduced the Father God of the Christian tradition, the Konds were very interested, because they felt that here they had found their missing Creator.  Tribal communities are interested in the “metacosmic” faiths, as has been remarked on by Aloysius Pieris. This attraction to a Faith system which goes beyond the Cosmos, possibly comes from the fact that here a male Father Deity is represented as the Creator of the human species; distinct from the creator of the rest of nature, who is believed to be feminine.
     Buddhist and Hindu Tantrism, which probably draws many important concepts from ancient tribal cosmologies, the figure of the great Mother Creator is understood as springing from the tears either of Shiva, or Buddha as Avalokateshwara. Later, the image of Tara probably re-emerges in the figure of Kuan Yin, the goddess of Divine mercy and Compassion, who was early understood by converts to Christianity in the Far East,  as representing Mary.  I do feel that there is an important link between this image of compassionate motherhood, and darker, more ambivalent features which we find very much present in the iconography of the Green Tara. There has been a tendency in the Christian understanding of the significance of Mary in the mystery of Incarnation, which has not consciously realized this other side of the Virgin Mother figure, which is perhaps more readily acknowledged in Buddhist and Hindu concepts of Kali and the Green Tara.E9
Here a compassionate aspect of the Divine, is also one which demands sacrifice, encompassing in her womb both Life and Death.
It is important to explore the significance of the Black Madonna right across Europe, whose cult extends to Spain, and has important links to the pilgrimage centres of Compostella, which was a very important pilgrimage centre of medieval Christianity. The black Madonna is often associated with places of danger, where pilgrims might have to pass through narrow gorges across for example the Alps, and are even in danger of being struck by lightening. The Black Madonna is thus not only a healer, and protector, but is also associated with those forces of the cosmos that portend danger, and the possibility of sickness and death. In pre-Christian times, she was probably Demeter, or a very primal Celtic, both of fertility, and an all-consuming power like that of Shakti.E10 We find here symbolism which can be traced back to Jewish ideas related to such feminine figures as the Shekinah or Hokmah, which are in a way feminine images of God, or the energies of God’s Presence in creation.E11 In the Gospel of James, the child Mary, herself the gift of God to aging and childless parents, is offered as soon as she learns to walk, to the Temple. She is represented as dancing on the third step leading up to the Holy of Holies, and is like Wisdom dancing before the mystery of the Godhead, at the beginning of Creation. Later, when she reaches the age of twelve, and has to be formally given over into the care of an honourable widower, Joseph, we find her busy at the task of weaving the veil of the temple, out of blue and scarlet material. It is while she is weaving this veil, that the angel of the Lord appears to her, and tells her that she is going to be the vessel or Tabernacle, of the Divine Word in the form of the child Jesus.

Mary, Symbol of the Divine Presence in the Temple.
In this connection it is interesting to note how this apocryphal material, which has been associated with a Gnostic trend in the Christian, as well as earlier Jewish tradition, is early associated with the pilgrimage to compostella, which means “the field of the star”, where it was believed that St James the brother of the Lord, was martyred. Of course, all this belongs to the mythic substrata, one might call it, of Christian piety. But it is a flowering of that piety which is close to mysticism, for which James was known, drawing on early traditions of the Jewish Church at Jerusalem over which James presided. This early Gospel of James had a considerable influence on the depiction of the infancy narratives in medieval art, right up to the representation of childhood both of Mary and Jesus by Giotto.E12 It is here in these stories that we find that Mary is as much a part of the mystery of the Incarnation, as her Son.  Mary is herself the embodiment of the Tabernacle in which the Divine Presence will come to rest. She is also in a mysterious way that veil which is drawn across the dark cave in which the Child is born, for according to the Gospel of James, Jesus is represented as coming into this world out of the depths of a cave where Mary hides in order to bear him, and protects him from those who wished to destroy him.
This image of Mary as the alter side of Christian piety, associated very much with the Anawim, or poor, whose cause she championed in the “magnificat,” brings us back to the importance of images like this in the context of the Third World.  It is not possible in this short essay to detail the various links one might draw between such figures as the Black Madonna and images of the Divine in the Feminine that we find in figures like Tara and Kali. Another connection that might be worth looking more deeply into is the tradition of the Magi. Like the figure of the Black Madonna, the three Magi had a rich and imaginative appeal throughout the middle ages. This story of the “wise men from the East” who came in search of a star (remember again the link between Tara and the star) has been used to assert the importance of other cultural traditions in the adoration of the child Jesus. From early on, one of the Magi was represented as dark skinned. Later each culture of the emerging Christian traditions of the East has appropriated this story to show how it was not only those who came from the West who bore witness to the Incarnation, but also peoples whose wisdom traditions were marginalized by the dominant Western Church. In a shrine on the way to Compestella, which I visited, I found a figure of Anna in whose lap was seated the young Mary, carrying the baby Jesus at her youthful breast. What was particularly striking about this painted wooden statue, was the dark features of the old mother Anna, and the fact that she was shown with a turban, which had a very marked oriental character. Was this old Mother here portrayed as a woman belonging to the Gypsy community, who had come originally to Europe from the shores of North India?  As in the case of the long tradition of the Queen of Sheba, who is supposed to have travelled from the East to see Solomon, we probably have here an Occidental tradition, which sees Mary as the child of that Eastern feminine figure who was very important to the Wisdom literature of the later books of the Bible. Many figures probably overlap here, such as Esther, the queen of Persia, and the mysterious shepherdess of the Song of Songs, who was dark, but beautiful.
    As mentioned earlier, in the Eastern Icon tradition the Incarnation is shown with Mary lying, not in the outhouse of an inn, where the animals are kept, but  rather in a cave. The light of the star above this cave pierces deep into the dark womb of the earth. One is reminded of the passage in the book of Samuel :
He bowed the heavens also, and came down ; and darkness was under his feet.
And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly : and he was seen upon the wings of the wind.
And he made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.   [2 Sam. 22   7-12]

Here we see that the story of the Incarnation as a re-invention of the act of Creation itself, having a truly Cosmic significance:
O Lord, my God, thou art very great : thou art clothed with honour and majesty,
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment :
Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain ;
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters ;
Who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind.
            [Ps. 104]

The Sources of Wisdom
“Where, then, does wisdom lie? Easy to trace where the veins of silver run, where gold-ore is refined, where iron is dug from the depths of earth, and rocks must be melted to yield copper. See, how man has done away with darkness, has pierced into the very heart of things, into caves under ground, black as death’s shadow! Where yonder ravine cuts them off from the shepherd-folk, the miners toil, forgotten; lost to all track, far from the haunts of men. That earth, from whose surface our bread comes to us, must be probed by fire beneath, till the rocks yield sapphires, and the clods gold. Here are passages no bird discovers in its flight, no vulture’s eye has seen ; that never gave roving merchant shelter, or the lioness a lair.”   [Job 28 1-9.]
In his study of the legend of the three Wise Men from the East,E13 Richard Trexler shows how the story of the Magi has been not merely a pious example of devotion to the Incarnate Lord, but has been used to legitimise concepts of trade, and the colonizing of distant lands. The story in the Gospel is meant to illustrate the prophetic idea that all the nations will come to offer homage to the Messiah, born of a virgin. Offerings of gold, and precious spices from the East are brought as a kind of tribute to the new sovereign, born of heaven. It is here that the original idea of wise men coming from the East is replaced with the image of kings. In the proto-evangelium of James we read :

“XXI.1…….and there came a great tumult in Bethlehem of Judaea ; for there came wise men, saying : Where is he that is born king of the Jews?……
3. And the wise men went forth. And lo, the star which they saw in the east went before them until they entered into the cave : and it stood over the head of the cave. And the wise men saw the young child with Mary his mother : and they brought out of their scrip gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh…..”

    (The Apocryphal New Testament, translated by M.R. James)

In this image of the Incarnation taking place in the dark space of a cave, one could relate the star with the light of the mind, or the conscious word. The mystery of the Incarnation takes place in the cave of the heart, as it is understood in oriental spirituality, into which the mind has to descend. The journey of the magi is not simply a geographic path from the East to the West, but from mental knowledge, to a deeper knowledge of the heart. Later Peter in his epistle speaks of the “Day star rising in your hearts”.

Symbolism of light and darkness in relation to the mystery of the cave.
    The symbolism of the star and the cave is discussed at some length by Hugo Rahner sj in his book “Greek Myths and Christian Mystery” (Biblo and Tannen, New York, 1971). He writes :

Clement of Alexandria…..refers to Christ as “Sun of the Resurrection, begotten before the morning star, giving life with thy rays”. The grave is the womb. Both represent night, out of which the sun rises. “ At night was Christ born in Bethlehem,” says a Greek sermon for Holy Saturday, “at night he is born again in Sion.”
   
This idea of a similarity between resurrection and birth gains support from the Graeco-Roman habit of regarding birthdays as a kind of sunrise. “Sunlight is the symbol of birth”, says Plutarch ; and the Christian Clement says much the same.
“Sunrise, he tells us, “is the symbol of a birthday”. Thus the sunrise of his Easter birth is for Jesus but the completion of that mystery of light that was proclaimed on the night when he was born of Mary. He is “the dayspring from on high” (Luke 1.78), “a light to the revelation of the Gentiles” (Luke 2.32)
   
Hugo Rahner goes on to describe a pre-Christian mystery cult from which he believes many of the symbols associated with the Nativity have drawn inspiration :
Throughout the whole night the people keep themselves awake here by singing certain hymns and by means of the flute-playing which accompanies the songs they sing to the image of their god. When they have ended these nocturnal celebrations, then at morning cock-crow they descend, carrying torches, into a sort of chapel which is below the ground, and thence they carry up a wooden image of one lying naked upon a bier. This image has upon its forehead a golden cross, and two more such seals in the form of crosses one on each hand and two further ones, one on each knee, making five such golden seals in all.  Then they carry the wooden image seven times round the innermost confines of the temple to the sound of flutes, tambourines and to the singing of hymns, and when the procession is over, they return the image to the subterranean place from which it was taken. And if anyone asks them what manner of mysteries these might be, they reply, saying : “Today at this hour Kore, that is the Virgin, has given birth to Aion.”  [Page 132]

Of course it is well known that in many medieval churches right across France, and also Switzerland, the Black Madonna is enshrined in a crypt like chapel, under ground---as can be seen for example at Chartres. These figures of Mary holding her baby in the dark cave like recesses of a holy space below the ground, have probably been adapted from earlier pre-Christian, and Celtic shrines to the earth mother. The mother holds her child who stands in her lap, and in fact the term applied to this iconography speaks of the seated mother, using the word “sedes”, which it might be noted is also linked to “seed”, which is the unit of life bearing germ planted in the lap of mother earth, so that it may grow. In Indian Tantric thought, this “seated Mother” is also the “Peetha”, the “Seat” or “Throne” of the feminine principle.
    In contrast to the Mother, who is dark, the child is often golden. The connection between gold, and the seed hidden in the depths of the earth, is reminiscent of the light which is born out of the womb of darkness.  The star not only shows the way to the cave, but enters the cave, and is in a sense the principle of light which impregnates the virgin Mother. Here we begin to unveil a world of symbolism, which is not possible in this short essay to explore in full. But the treasures that are being revealed here, are born out of darkness, which is not something negative, but is rather the great mystery of the Divine. Here, as we find in the Isha Upanishad, what is being touched on is a darkness even more profound than light --- what a metaphysical poet has called a “deep and dazzling darkness”, which is a wisdom beyond conscious knowledge.

Conclusion.
    The image of the cave as a space lying at the very heart of matter, has played a very important part in understanding, not only the process of birthing, but also the way in which we conceive the embodiment of Light. Too often in the kind of western dialectical way of reasoning, light has been depicted as simply the opposite of darkness, so that where light is, darkness disappears. But in the mythic, imaginative language of the intuitive mind, light is born out of darkness; and this does not mean that darkness is simply eclipsed, made meaningless and defunct. Darkness is a dimension of the spiritual Energy, which has brought creation to birth. Perhaps in the image of Kali, the Green Tara, or the Black Madonna, we have an understanding not only of the role of the feminine in creation, but also of the darkness that is an essential part of the Divine Mystery. Too often blackness, or darkness, is only associated with evil, which has profound consequences for those who are marginalized and find themselves in the shadowy world of subcultures. By recognizing the vital importance of darkness in the spiritual life of a community, a necessary healing process is initiated, which acknowledges the Presence of God, not only in the illumined world of those who are very much in the focus of light, but are confined to those subliminal underworlds which are often the domain of the poor and fugitive. That Christ was born not in the light of a palace, but in the darkness of a cave, is itself part of the essential mystery of the Incarnation, which included and exalted those who are poor and unrecognised.