The figure of the curvaceous naked woman was originally painted red. She wears the horned headdress characteristic of a Mesopotamian deity and holds a rod and ring of justice, symbols of her divinity.... Her long multi-colored wings hang downwards, indicating that she is a goddess of the Underworld. The background was originally painted black, suggesting that she was associated with the night. She stands on the backs of two lions, and a scale pattern indicates mountains. The figure could be an aspect of the goddess Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love and war, or Ishtar's sister and rival, the goddess Ereshkigal who ruled over the Underworld, or the demoness Lilitu, known in the Bible as Lilith. The plaque probably stood in a shrine. The same goddess appears on small, crude, mould-made plaques from Babylonia. Thermoluminescence tests confirm that the “Queen of the Night” relief was made between 1800 and 1750 B. C. E.

[From the British Museum]

The Gypsy Scholar celebrates the return "Dark Feminine"

Our Dark Lady of the Tower of Song has been known throughout the ages under many different guises (including Shakespeare's "Dark Lady"). As the "Queen of the Night," she was worshipped early as the Moon-Goddess, Love-Goddess, Wisdom Goddess, and Underworld Goddess, such as Ishtar, Astarte, Inanna, Ashtoreth, Cybele, Isis, Hecate, Selene, Venus-Aphrodite, Diana. Much later, in the Middle Ages, this pagan Underworld Goddess, turned up in cave sanctuaries in the South of France, now worsipped by Cathar-Troubadours as "Black Sophia," which was the archetype of the recently rediscovered (Christian) "Black Madonnas" of Europe. She became associated with Mary Magdalene of the Bible, of whom legend tells arrived in the South of France to initiate the Holy Grail tradition and to inspire the buliding of a secret tower-library ("Tour Magdala").

It is the message of this essay that, with the introduction of the Troubadour’s “Lady of Thought” into Western culture, we witness the return—an archetypal “return of the repressed”—of a divine figure that the Church tried countless times in vain to suppress, but who the once-pagan people fashioned again as the “Black Madonnas,” which have been recently rediscovered in churches all over Europe.

The Dark Feminine is a powerful archetype that represents the alien and rejected "Other" in Western culture and psyche, presaging transformation. As a syncretic epiphany of the earlier pagan dark goddesses, she has returned to reunite the what patriarchal, Christian metaphysics split asunder; light and dark, spirit and nature, sacred and profane love. Given this religious history of repression, I maintain that it's only through the divine agency of this dark archtype that the rupture in the Western psyche can be healed, since the repressed element in patriarchal religion is not just the “Great Goddess” per se, but, specifically, and more importantly, her dark aspect, which carries rejected elements that need to be encountered and integrated into our psyches and our culture at large--whether the rejected "other" is an interior or a social phenomenon. In this argument, I find confirmation in the writings of Caitlin Matthews on Divine Feminine as Black Sophia:

". . . for it is only by homage to her that we may find the Goddess of Wisdom, [Sophia] . . .. An appreciation of the Black Goddess is coming slowly into perspective within the West. She is waiting in the wings patiently to emerge, knowing that she will have to play many parts . . . ."

She’s an ubiquitous and irrepressible force, this dark goddess, and you never know where this “invisible girl” is going to appear next. Yesterday it was in the Black Sophia sanctuaries of the Cathari/Troubadours in Southern France, today, in our thoroughly secular and profane age, her epiphanies occur in the last place any self-respecting goddess worshipper would expect--not in the usual place of worship, not even in some new-age temple of love-and-light either, but rather in the midst of our messy and fragmented daily lives. (She makes possible the profound and the profane existing all at once.) Thus, we can sing out in joyous affirmation at the sacred marriage finally enacted in or everyday (profane) world--right there on Babylonian "Boogie Street" (L. Cohen):

The Gypsy Scholar argues that we are today, individually and collectively, in the process of a reclamation project that involves the revaluation of the "dark" (or "Romantic Nightworld") aspect of life (the body, sexuality, the earth, etc.); everything that is associated in the patriarchal order as the "feminine," including everything infernal and inferior that is a genuine part of life. This is, metaphorically speaking, a raising the dark (pagan) goddess from the underworld or "hell" (the infernal region; "inferos" or hell); a raising and return of Inanna/Ishtar from the underworld, where she has been consigned forever by our Apollonian/Christian (patriarchal) culture. This reclamation process (a continuation of the Nietzschean "revaluation of all values or the transvaluation of all values") operates on both the inner and outer worlds. On the psychological level, it is the reclaiming of the anima's (the feminine's) "inferior function" (Jung). This means that we go against the grain of the "values" of our patriarchal order and purposely embrace those very things (vices?) that are counter-intuitive to a move toward transcendence. We get "down" with it (not "up" in a spiritualizing move), which means (among other things) that our pathologies (depressions, phobias, dysfunctional relationships, etc.) are re-visioned as the native states of the soul and therefore integral to our psychic lives. This is, admittedly, not the strait-and-narrow path to monotheistic salvation (whether of old- or new-age religion); it is rather a "crooked path" (Blake) to wholeness and embodied "radical aliveness." This revolutionary (turning patriarchal values upside down) path of embodied spirituality is a kind of Western version of the Tantric "Left-hand path," by which we don't get to "spirit" in the conventional way--through repression. Instead (with a kind of Buddhist "discrimination"), we take the very things that are supposed to lead in the opposite direction and use them in service to our quest for wholeness. However, as the outsider Steppenwolf was told, "Not for everyone, but for madmen only."  One such madman was William Blake ("They call'd me madman ..."), who must have been walking down Boogie Street in his time: "As I was walking through the fires of Hell enjoying the delights of Genius, which to angels look like torment and insanity . . ."

Therefore, the sweet burden of the Gypsy Scholar's argument-in-song:

This is what Boogie Street is for!

Mary Magdalene as the Dark Lady

of the Tower of Song's

Memorial-Musekal Library

"The Tour Magdala"

The Secret Biography of Mary Magdalene:
Our Dark Lady of the Tower of Song

The Magdalene, who in her role as "sacred prostitute" may have been part of a Ishtar-Aphrodite-Diana love cult in the ancient Mid-East, actually had a Dianic temple rededicated to her (13th century). Her name, Magdalene, means "she of the temple-tower," a temple-tower presumably dedicated in Jerusalem to Mary as the incarnation of the Triple Goddess Mari-Anna-Ishtar, mother of the savior-son and worshiped as the Great Whore anointed. As "prostitute" (meaning an unmarried, independent woman), she was harlot-priestess and "virgin" of Ishtar-Aphrodite-Diana (moon-goddess) cult. The ancient temple-harlots were "holy virgins," or "soul-teachers." The Magdalene was also referred to as "alma," the "living soul of the world," which indicates her secret identity with the goddess Psyche. And, as Jesus' "dearly beloved," she is the Gnostic counterpart to the savior--Sophia. In the Gnostic Gospels she is "Mary Lucifer"--"Mary the Light-giver," indicating the feminine aspect of the gnostic Lucifer who, as light-giver, was a savior figure in the Garden of Eden, and whose close association with the planet Venus, the morning star, made him the son/consort of the Triple Goddess. Thus, the Gnostic Magdalene (of the Gnostic Gospels) was known as "the Woman Who Knew the All," an epithet that probably earned her the jealous hatred of Jesus' primary male disciples, as indicated in the Gospel of Mary, the first feminist tract, where only she is given the "secret teachings" of the master. She was also the only recipient of an erotic kiss from Jesus. (Some "legends" speak of Mary Magdalene's marriage to Jesus, from whom she bore a female child.) These teachings were later said to be brought to Southern France by a pregnant Mary, along with the Grail Cup, and thus the origin of the medieval romances and secret love cults centered in the region of Languedoc, home of the Troubadours and Cathars (the Cathars who worshiped a "Black Sophia" and who supposedly disseminated a secret wisdom from Mary Magdalene, not to mention establishing a secret erotic mysticism). According to the Gnostic text, the Pistis Sophia (wherein "A greater part of the myths surrounding Sophia concern her continual quest to be reunited with her consort."), The Magdalene is equated with the Divine Sophia and plays the role of the "questioner of Jesus." And Everybody Knows that a good lover must also be a good questioner!--"Who is the real Beloved?" and "Who is the real Lover?"

Or, for that matter, thinking about the entire issue of the Troubadours and the Beloved in terms of "Love in the Western World" and its manifestation through the theme of "Love and Death" (in Tristan & Islode), the question may also be: "Where do you want me to put the third rose?" (Ref. to Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola) [For ruminations on these questions, see p. 10 "Troubadours & The Beloved".]