- The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation
Black Madonnas startle for their differences with many other Marian devotional images. They pose an inherent paradox in the Judeo-Christian dialectic between black and white, signifiers of negative and positive values. This new worldwide study on “Black Madonnas,” however, sidesteps the challenging questions that are provoked by their coloration and the evolving cultural meaning of blackness, to focus instead on the syncretic nature of these dark-skinned female deities.
In this often-personalized account, Matgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba brings her extensive fieldwork and linguistic skills to bear on a broad cross-cultural overview. The author alights on four geographical zones that define the parameters of the main chapters and in each selects specific devotions. These include Our Lady of Czesto-chowa in Poland, the Virgin of Guadalupe in colonial Mexico and the Southwest United States (Texas to California), and the deity Iemanjá (Yemayá) in Brazil, as well as, briefly, the Virgin of Charity in Cuba. The temporal sweep is just as expansive, moving from the Neolithic period in Europe to the present-day. A Jungian approach to enduring symbols and archetypes is foundational to the author’s analysis. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba draws parallels between disparate regions that depend on essentializing themes in the world of myth, symbol, and the “Great Goddess complex.” [End Page 285] Although the ever-fluctuating dynamics of religions and devotional objects are acknowledged, the driving thesis in the book is the timeless “story of the veneration of the dark feminine” carried in humanity’s “collective memory” (pp. 161–62), recalling Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.
The search for universals is explicitly articulated in the author’s linkage of the black Virgin of Czestochowa in Poland with pre-Christian mother goddesses of the procreative earth, establishing the “ancient archetype of a powerful woman” (p. 19) that frames much of her ensuing discussion. Following Marija Gimbutas, the author finds the Neolithic goddess-centered cult reemerging as veneration of the Christian Virgin Mary who fulfills many of the same functions in rituals for women. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the oscillation between past and present creates disturbing disjunctions. As one example, the abstract pubic triangle, a putative sign of the Great Goddess, is connected to the triangular configuration of Marian dressed sculptures.
Chapters 2 and 4 on the Virgin of Guadalupe follow conventional accounts on the history of the colonial devotion. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba states that the Virgin of Guadalupe was not only superimposed over a plethora of pre-Hispanic deities, but that she is in fact a “goddess, the ancient, all-powerful Great Mother of birth, death and regeneration” (p. 50), although the more nuanced mechanics of the transformation in the ontology and reception of the icon are left unexplained. More problematic are the digressions into other conflated symbol clusters, such as the “serpent and bird” in which the positive meanings of eagle in precontact Mesoamerica are compared to the Christian Holy Spirit and the “Winged Mary” of the biblical Book of Revelations. To justify these associations, the author falls back on the facile observation that they were each carriers of multiple layers of meaning.
The central importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the U.S. Southwest, designated as Aztlán, makes the strongest case for the ongoing resignification of religious symbols. In the negotiated spaces of the borderlands, Guadalupe is a highly charged Chicano/a emblem that toggles between the sign for ethnic and national loyalties and that of empowerment and resistance. Tellingly, Oleszkiewicz-Peralba recognizes that in the fluidity of religious symbols “prototypes often become unrecognizable” (p. 160), an admission that seems to undercut much of her thesis on the originary role of the Great Goddess as the precursor for the many manifestations of the Black Madonna. African culture is added to the “alloyed cultures” of Brazil and Cuba in chapter 3. The book makes a substantial contribution in examining the Candomblé religion of the...