Today I write on the celebration day of St Sarah, Princess Tamar, the Black Madonna of St Marie de la Mer.
The first time I ever went there was many years ago and quite by accident, and it also happened to be the festival of the gipsies with streets packed with music and festivities such as bulls running through. The word gipsy comes from Egyptian. Sarah (Princess) Tamar ( palm fruit symbolism) was an Egyptian Princess and Priestess and daughter of Mary Magdalene.
We found the only room available in the town, and camped out with our 2 babies in the tiny bed. I was tandem breast feeding at the time. I recall the visit to the church built upon an ancient Isis temple, that mirrors Avalon, the tower surrounded by waters, these waters filled with white horses. After some time in the crypt with St Sarah, we climbed to the chapel on the top of the tower. On the way up my daughter fell and cut her knee open on a grid. So their dad went to get tissues and we were left alone in the chapel at the top and I found myself breast feeding 2 babies covered in blood in front of the Mary altar at the top. My daughter still has the scar on her knee.
Something happened that was beyond words.
Later that night we stood with a double pushchair by the sea and a rainbow appeared with an apparition of Mary and people were wailing and crying and running into the ocean.
Over a decade later, I found myself back there in the same crypt with Sarah again, this time as a high priestess, away from my children and with my French love, piecing together a torn open heart.
She does that, she tears your heart open and then fills it again with the deepest grace.
I home birthed my first baby many years ago in an ancient hamlet on the moors in UK. We lived in a one room attic of an old rectory to a sacred little chapel with a yew in it grown from Glastonbury abbey. Just near a powerful large stone circle. The other house was lived in by a well known reclusive old painter who became a great friend. There was a Mary in the window and I prayed to her and slept under her each night and developed a very deep relationship with her and this ancient site. I always thought it was Mother Mary. Life went on filled with many rose and priestess initiations. But recently I found myself back in the beloved hamlet and I went to the little church and I saw it was not Mother Mary in the window who I had prayed to so often but it was Mary Magdalene with her chalice.
Black Madonna, is both Mary Magdalene and the Princess (Sarah) Tamar. I went to live in Italy and the land there filled me with Her Light. I feel her there like nowhere else. My partner was showing work in Venice Biannale and we met someone who knew someone and we ended up in an ancient artist cobbly stone house in southern Tuscany. We were not getting on very well and I was sleeping with the children in a different room. I had the shutters open at night due to the heat and at sunrise I woke to close them. As I crept over to close them one morning, trying not to wake the children, I looked out of the window at the sunrise over the hills and had a moment. I lay back on the bed and had a flash vision of a tower on a hill. The next day we went to some springs to swim it was recommended we went to a certain place but another drew me, so we went to the other. In those wild springs, I filled my soul deep with the blue soft clay waters gushing over the slippery rocks in the high heat, and as I looked up there in the distance was the same hill with the tower from my vision earlier that morning. I later found out it was a Magdalena church.
She calls like that.
She calls.
Last night as I slept I saw steps up to a divine mother chapel somewhere in southern Italy, I saw her in gold with her arms reached open and out calling me, I smelt the incense, and her face flickered before me in the candle light.
Divine Mother.
Ancients crypts, pillars supporting sacred temples, black madonnas steeped in legends and paint peeling from walls of frescos once filled with blues and golds.
This is an ancient call that so many of us know so well, and it goes back life after life after life and it makes no sense but it calls so deep.
And life events spiral round and round and bring you back to her again and again and you realise she was there all along again and again.
And now she is gathering us all up, the calls are deepening, and there is not a moment to lose. Go and open and surrender to her, give her you all and she will reward you with the deepest treasures and golds you can ever imagine, she will fill your soul with the deepest light, of love. sacred sacred mother love. divine love. she is waiting for you. She always has been.
Her time is here and she is rising more than ever.
xxxxx
Images, a selection of photos in Italy & France from my phone of the places mentioned in this text, some from a museum, I believe the sketch of Her is by Michelangelo?? I can't trace it xxx
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