♪ ♫ Get yerself a black Madonna....♪ ♫

Wanting to tie up any loose ends regarding my experiences with Black Madonnas, I decided to write a brief post on two roadside shrines I photographed years ago featuring Virgins dark in hue.

The first is located in the small town of Loubens-Lauragais, where an American acquaintance of mine once lived.  I made a web search to see if I could find any info on this shrine and there, on the village website,  I saw a link to...."la vierge noire".  I was both surprised and delighted.

The link leads to a PDF which tells us the legend of a child about to be attacked by a wolf and saved by an apparition of the Virgin.  Indeed, the parish church is dedicated to Notre Dame de Loubens-Lauragais.  This incident almost certainly gave the village it's name, as Loubens (Lobens de Lauragués in Occitan) is derived from the word for wolf.  "Lop" in some dialects of Occitan, "Lobo" in Spanish" etc.  In Latin is it "lupus."  We can see from the two examples how he "b" and the "p" in Romance languages interchange. 

The sculptor was Regis Vialaret, who also painted the interior of the church and apparently was a friend of the local priest.  The work is ceramic, made sometime in the 1950's.  The shrine is built into the wall of the local chateau, a modest affair belonging to a family of minor local nobles with a rich family history.

Calling it a "vierge noire" is a canny stroke, given contemporary interest in the phenomenon.  I would stop to visit if I was passing that way if I knew there was a Black Virgin to be found, and so would many others.  As it turns out, I was there anyway, took an interest in the sculpture, but never thought of it in the Black Virgin context until now....and my instinct has been vindicated.  As far as I can tell, no miracles are attributed to this statue and it doesn't have a fervent cult.....but it is dark and I can only imagine that the artist was either referring to the phenomenon of the Black Virgins or had his own aesthetic reasons, the appellation Black Virgin added later.

I think the wolf as an animal of pagan goddesses could be evoked here, but I'm more inclined to think  it's a straightforward reference is to the legend and the very real danger wolves presented to villagers in the Middle Ages, back when they were more numerous and apparently, much larger.

Coincidentally, I just saw the film Brotherhood of the Wolf, a fantastical take on real events in 18th-century France about the the Beast of Gévaudan.  This was a real reign of terror; in the course of a year or two there were over 200 attacks and nearly a hundred deaths by a wolf, wolf-pack or wolf hybrid.  The exact nature of the animal(s) is still not clear.  Although this is an extreme case, the danger was widespread.   This Virgin commemorates that collective memory.

The second roadside shrine in this post is also a more contemporary statue, but I have absolutely no details about it.  I can't even remember where it is.  Is does appear in a folder between photographs I took at Aspet and St. Béat....that is to say two chapels dedicated to Black Virgins.  There are several others within a short distance of these as well, representing a kind of micro-cluster among the already well-represented Pyrenées.  My next (and last post) on this phenomenon will discuss some examples I photographed in Andorra, which, as far as I can tell, have not been documented as Black Virgins.

What these two shrines tell me is that the Blackness of certain Virgins continues to exert a fascination and continues to be a salient feature worth referring to, even in humble devotions. Although the majority of the "BVs" are Romanesque works or post-Revolutionary re-creations of statues thrown onto the bonfires, it's more interesting to see this not as a static historical phenomenon but an ongoing devotion which is, to judge by the number of books and articles which continue to appear on the subject, a notable manifestation of contemporary spirituality.

P.S.  Jan. 16, 2012.

Gid asked in a comment (see below) if the second Madonna was holding Jesus.

From the close-up taken from the picture on the left, it would appear Mary is holding her hands in prayer and not the infant Jesus.

The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf

Seems like I bungled my post on the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping.... unable to see the forest for the trees, so focused on synchromystic jibba-jabba that I neglected to note the obvious.

When I spent so much time on the name Dugard--"from the garden"--and thinking only of Jesus' night of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane, how could I have missed the Garden of Eden? Probably because I'm currently involved in a dispute with neighbors which has in fact left me sleepless and anguished. Although it is a matter of beams and nails, my crucifixion doesn't seem to be imminent.

If I could see beyond my own nose I might have noticed that Dugard's story can be seen in the terms of the Eden myth. Sexuality and the loss of innocence. It was the Gid who pointed this out to me so I leave it there, as a challenge to the Gid to lay it all out for us. Let the preacher's kid untangle it!

The second (at least!) point of neglect is the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. I warbled on about St. Thérèse and Anne Frank and forgot to go into this gem of a tale. Worst of all, I'd thought of it and then decided, nah, fuggit. Then this morning I awoke to read a story about Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell, a young woman of 19 who was killed by coyotes while walking in the woods and then after thinking "holy shit that's horrible," I remembered the tale.

So, here goes. Apparently the tale was told in the 14th c. by peasants in both France and Italy and may have roots in Eastern or "Oriental" tales with similar themes. There are many versions; sometimes the girl is eaten and sometimes she escapes; sometimes involuntary cannibalism occurs. Sometimes the wolf is a werewolf or an ogre. Sexual overtones abound.

The first written version was published by Frenchman Charles Perrault in 1697. In his version the girl is eaten and there the story ends. A moral tacked onto the end explains that the story is a warning to "good girls" to resist the sexual advances of men.

Since Perrault, many variations have appeared but most know the version as told by the Brothers Grimm.

The Grimm version is almost certainly a re-telling of Perault's except in the end, where a hunter after the wolf's skin saves the girl and her grandmother. In this version the grandmother and the girl are swallowed whole by the wolf, but emerge unharmed after the hunstman cuts the beast open. This ending sees to have been taken from yet another tale. The Grimms also wrote a sequel in which grandmother and the girl trap and kill another wolf with a cunning ruse: they drown him after luring him with a pot of water which had been used to cook sausages.

Many interpretations have been made of the fairy tale, only a few of which I'll mention here. Obviously, wolf attacks were a serious problem in the Middle Ages, so it may have simply began as a cautionary tale to young kids, much like stories of La Llorona are thought to have begun as a way to scare kids away from dangerous waterways.

Alan Dundes has analyzed the tale and interpreted it as the story of a girl who leaves home and in various actions crosses a threshold; she emerges from the belly of the beast as a woman. In another Freudian analysis, Bruno Bettelheim sees it as a rebirth; the child is reborn coming from the wolf, her emotions liberated.

Yet another interpretation sees the story as a warning against falling into the trap of prostitution; supporters of this theory note that the red cloak was a common symbol of hookers in 17th c. France. Less pernicious perhaps is the idea that the story represents sexual awakening. "In this interpretation, the red cloak symbolizes the blood of the menstrual cycle, braving the "dark forest" of womanhood. Or the cloak could symbolize the hymen....In this case, the wolf threatens the girl's virginity. The anthropomorphic wolf symbolizes a man, who could be a lover, seducer or sexual predator...."

We would argue that the pedophile and the kid-snatcher has replaced the Big Bad Wolf as the ultimate danger of our time, lurking in the forest after the sun goes down, ready to pounce; the former is the metaphor for the latter. Indeed the wolf has always had a connotation of sexual aggressiveness. The leering wolf-whistle as the statuesque blond walks past the construction site, Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf (I'm on the hunt I'm after you....) All of these sexual wolf metaphors may derive from this very tale or others like it; the wolf and sexual danger have become intrinsically linked. Wikipedia offers a brief summary of modern adaptations, such as popular songs, cartoons and fiction in which the sexuality of the tale is explored.

Blatant eroticism has been a trope of the vampire tale since Bram Stoker. Less so perhaps for the werewolf but nonetheless, there is clearly a brute sexuality to the lycanthrope. A normal man goes about his everyday business until the full moon appears. In the maiden-mother-crone cycle of pagan moon-lore, the full moon represents the point when the woman is most fertile, full, bountiful. "Mother" may be the appellation but the implication is fertility and thus sexuality. An in the presence of the full woman our mild-mannered lycanthrope turns into an uncontrollable beast with an immense hunger for flesh. While not universally true, the werewolf in European cultures is usually a man.

According to NASA, however, neither June 10, 1991 (Dugard kidnapping) nor November 22, 1976 (Callaway kidnapping) were full moons; though certainly a beast, we can rule out lycanthropy in Garrido's case!

Wikipedia again makes the point that certain modern interpretations of the tale resemble "animal bridegroom" stories such as The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. This latter is perhaps even more telling than the tale of Riding Hood. In the popular Disney film, the Beast first holds young Belle's father as a prisoner but agrees to free him if Belle agrees to take his place. Although coarse and full of anger, the Beast treats Belle kindly, slowly revealing a more sensitive side. Given her freedom, Belle returns of her own volition to save the Beast from his tormentors. She has fallen in love with the Beast, and her tears transforms him back into a handsome young Prince. Cue the dancing candelabra; they live happily ever after.

One might reasonably construe this as a glorification of the Stockholm syndrome. Given the prevalence of the fairy tale in our culture, it shouldn't be so surprising that Dugard never seemed to try and escape her captor. We speak of her as being imprisoned, but it seems she had some degree of freedom, working in Garrido's printshop, interacting with the public. Her children have been described as fairly well-adjusted and clever. Not exactly feral kids locked in a cage for years. Disney's celebrated version of the film was released on November 13, 1991. A week and a day before the Dugard kidnapping!

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being. The Wolf in Riding Hood you will recall, dresses itself in Grandma's nightdress and bonnet in order to fool Little Red. And what is the Beast but a lycanthrope stuck in his animal state?

Hunter Thompson brought the following quote by Samuel Johnson to many peoples' attention: "He who makes a beast of himself avoids the pain of being a man." I always thought Thompson was explaining, even advocating, his particular kind of behavior. Now I'm not sure that it isn't merely scorn, or an impersonal observation. Men are dogs, they say. And they are right.