Book Review: The Black Virgin
Getting started
The book we are talking about is The Black Virgin: a Marian Mystery by Jean Hani (1995, tr. 2007). Hani (1917-2012) was a professor of Greek civilization at the University of Amiens; if the internet’s picture of the majestic old man with the flowing silver hair is really him, he looks like he was a professor at some turreted, mist-wrapped French university — maybe circa 1650.
In the very first chapter he declares, “Our purpose is the study of the sacred.” This will be vital to remember, because otherwise you might think you are stumbling through another academic skeptic’s cataloguing of ancient myths and statuary, to show that Christianity isn’t original.
The statues, and the reality of Mary
Statues are his starting point. How to explain the weird “Black Virgins” resting in the crypts of Gothic cathedrals all over southern and central France? Some of them look like they were shipped directly from Easter Island, yet we are to call them Mary and the Christ child.
Hani argues that these pieces are indeed heirlooms (or re-creations) from Greco-Roman and Celtic ages that honored the Great Mother. People may have shunned them upon conversion to the Church circa the 400s A.D., but they kept folk memories of what and where they had worshiped. A few centuries later, the educated monastic orders accepted and exalted these wondrous precursors of Mary, which is why Black Virgins were “discovered” in the 11th and 12th centuries, and cathedrals honoring Our Lady built atop the crypts.
Since Hani is studying the sacred he goes on to prove, starting with Christian liturgical texts and prayers, that we are witnessing Mary doing God’s will in helping to “salvage” truths that mankind had always groped toward but never fully known until Christ and the Church. Life and death, the night sky (black), the fecundity of the earth (black) and of women — these only introduce the list of things that leave mankind in awe everywhere.
The immensity of his scholarship
Hani’s scholarship is immense. He plausibly traces connections seemingly among every prayer ever made, and every color worn by the Virgin in art, and every culture that ever ruminated on the completing wholeness of opposites, even virginity and motherhood. For one whole chapter he resuscitates alchemy. Why? Because this medieval “sacred science” entailed collaborating with nature in “the Work” of redeeming matter — including oneself, fallen matter — by mixing mysterious opposites. Sulphur and mercury are opposites. The good Catholic always looked upward from matter to symbol to supernatural reality, so he fetched his flasks and beakers and got to work. And he carved “alchemical and zodiacal” symbols in Mary’s own houses, including Notre Dame in Paris, “the alchemical cathedral” (p.117).
Where it gets trippy
One of Hani’s supporting themes is a little strange. He believes that while groping toward variegated truths, mankind also naturally responded to “telluric currents,” real energies in the earth itself, which have always been present in certain places, for good or ill. It’s because of telluric currents that prehistoric villagers put their Black Virgins in sacred crypts to begin with. The reader frowns a little, and this is early in the scholarship. But the idea at least enables the author to get in a sharp thought. Why do modern churches have no warmth or specialness? Because church-building authorities don’t think the sacred has a place. Our churches are built just anywhere and anyhow. “Modern clergy don’t know anything important” (p. 122).
Why you bought the book and why you’ll keep it
You bought The Black Virgin because a podcast told you the book has a remarkable map locating the Marian cathedrals of medieval France, showing that they almost exactly duplicate the outline of the constellation Virgo in the black sky above. So in building churches, our ancestors put to use a staggering level of new scholarship and devotion and care — or else they simply took advantage of pre-existing crypts, to build where their own ancestors sensed something was afoot. And something is. That’s Hani’s main theme. You will keep this, and re-read it to learn more.
Nancy Wilschke is a lifelong writer and revert to the Catholic faith, whose journey spans early literary ambitions, family life, and a profound spiritual rediscovery. Her book Walking With Mary, Praying for the Unborn offers both a cultural witness and a prayerful act of reparation in defense of life.
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