Mysticism & Zen Meditation for Women – The Black Madonna – The Golden Madonna – Death Mother

The Black Madonna - Genuine Feminity

The Black Madonna prevailed through the power of love, compassion, empathy, and personal involvement in people's sorrows. She is empathetic and receives people's grief; therefore, as a compassionate mother, she is worthy of healing. She represented not only the earth, but especially water, which possessed sacred qualities (life arises from chaos). She represents depth and darkness. For the depth of things is dark.

The depth of the soul is dark. (Meister Eckhart)

She calls us down into the dark abyss; she represents the lower spheres. These are closer to the earth and so important to us, especially because we have lived in our heads for so long that we easily neglect our relationship with the earth. And, of course, it's about creativity, for as Carl Jung says, "Creativity comes from the realm of mothers," and that is part of the Black Madonna's encouragement: to give birth in many different ways. As Hildegard of Bingen says, wisdom is found in all creative works; The Black Madonna can be found in all creative works.

The Golden Madonna - Healing

But she also calls us to joy, to celebration, and to dance, and this is made very clear in the Sophia writings and the Wisdom Books of the Bible:

Draw near to me, all you who desire me, and enjoy my fruits, for the memory of me is sweeter than honey. To inherit me is sweeter than the honeycomb. Whoever eats me will hunger for more; whoever drinks me will thirst for more. Whoever listens to me will never blush.

So celebration is also part of the Dark Mother, and she naturally calls us to compassion, to imitate the care that the Black Madonna herself carries. She is the mother of all, especially the marginalized, the addicted, and the sick.

Facing the Death of a Mother - Wounded Femininity

We all know that when we come into this world, we are fragile, defenseless human beings, dependent from birth on the love and care of our parents. Experiencing this allows us to internalize the feeling of love, inner security, and trust in ourselves and our ability to rely on each other and to fulfill our best potential. As babies, we embody the fundamental equation: "I need you, you need me." It's a vulnerability we share with all other human beings. The fragile nature of existence, the deeply human sensitivity. Many of us are born without coming into the light. What happens then if our mothers aren't good enough?

What happens if the mother doesn't respond to her child's needs? In our culture, the family principle or the archetype of the feminine is so damaged that it's almost impossible to be good enough as anyone else (divorce, daycare, single mothers, fatherless families).

In our culture today in general, and in many of us individually, the most deadly influence of the negative mother is ever-present. This energy is incredibly destructive because it emanates from someone whose positive image and influence is fundamental and vital to us at the beginning of our lives—someone who supposedly loves us.

Far too often, we grow up trusting our mothers or trying our best to trust them until we slowly realize that we were unwanted, rejected, or that our mothers wished we were different or even dead.

In a society without initiation rites for men, men remain dependent on their mothers. In a sociological matriarchy, women are happy fat whores who boss men around. And the men are thin, submissive, and nervous mama's boys who work the fields and do the work for the women. Wealth, instinctual life, sexuality, and earthly happiness flourish. But there are no intellectual achievements at all; it's a world of utter stupidity without religion and meaning. (Marie-Louise von Franz)

The Fate of the Mother - Dark Wound

It's only natural to wonder what fates this young woman we call our mother experienced. What kind of ideas and experiences of love our mother had before she began to nurture us, or failed to nurture us. Our mother's emotional state is the genesis of our fate, which we struggle to see but carry on our backs when our mother abandons us or is weak. That she drains energy, drags us down, and paralyzes us. This is our most exhausting negative mother complex, which the vast majority of people have today.

Without understanding or connecting with the subconscious, they suffer the severe consequences of the darkest, most destructive power of female life without understanding it. We will explore this very dark wound that lies within most of us, the Death Mother, which lies deep in the cavern of our psyche and is ready to paralyze, castrate, and sterilize us. We must confront this destructive aspect of the feminine that rises within us and destroys our vitality and creativity with its paralyzing powers.

Death of a Mother in a Man - Father

Of course, we also had to consider the role of the father in the human experience, as well as that of mothers. The father, who has had one death for another, must struggle to heal himself, otherwise he will fail as a good father and either become emotionally over-dependent on his wife, experience deep anger toward women, or feel separation and become emotionally attached to them.

The role of the good father is very similar to that of a protective, sturdy wall that surrounds and protects the city in a loving but strong embrace. Outside the wall is the unknown, while lust is the enemy. Within the city, the house, the vegetable garden, the market, and the familiar contrast with the safe ground on which a family can grow up in safety. Therefore, the father's role is one of defense and protection in a masculine way, the mother's delicate task of raising her child with love, intelligence, energy, and patience. A mother who is nervous, anxious, unappreciated, depressed, or upset about the birth will cause her child to feel psychologically maladjusted. This child will have a personality based on a deep sense of fear and mistrust of the world.

The good enough mother, instead, is gentle, loving, and emotionally secure. She will help her child develop a fundamental trust in life and its place in the world, as she makes its essential contribution to it. The role of the father provides the mother with the grounding love, peace, and security she needs to be a good enough mother. The archetypal role of the good enough mother cannot be projected onto a nurturing father. The roles are not interchangeable archetypes. This does mean, however, that our culture must respect the role of parents more so that they are emotionally secure, as is the case in most European kinship circles.

This means they should be able to take sufficient time off work to give birth, nurture the maternal bond, and recover from childbirth without fear of not being paid, losing their job, or lacking good healthcare. Failure to meet this test is a failure in nurturing fatherhood and will create more instinctual bonds between mother and children, fostering the death mother in our culture. During this discussion, we should ask ourselves what it might look like if a man has the mother complex in his personality.

This man will be paralyzed by his negative death mother, in his own feminine side. This means he will be paralyzed by his emotions in general, especially negative emotions, and he will fear her overwhelming strength. He will be left with at least a mild degree of depression in general, with a fear of women and especially of confronting women. As a result of his fear, he will rely too heavily on reasoning and rationality.

We can explain the situation as follows: this man is overwhelmed by the negative mother complex, and this complex overwhelms his animal. This person is emotionally paralyzed and is constantly hurt and belittled by others. He is unable to provide structure, self-confidence, or emotional security to his family and children because the female side of his family is paralyzed.

The anima has been dominated by his negative mother complex. In each of these cases, the negative mother complex keeps the masculinity in a state of stagnation, as a well-developed masculinity is much more than mere reason. The Death Mother truly devoured the lives of men, causing severe harm to their families and serving as a force for negative projections. One of the most significant effects of the Death Mother is to paralyze her victim with her gaze.

The Poison of the Death Mother - Spiritual Child Molester

Most of us have to struggle for a long time to get our mothers to live up to the positive side of the mother archetype before we can face reality and begin the journey of learning how to be a good mother to ourselves and deal with the spiritual reservoir of anger that arises from not having a good mother.

Many of these women are terrified of facing their deep anger for fear it might overwhelm them.

We are left in a place we believe to be safe, but which is, in reality, a state of mind beneath our potential, a dull position devoid of vitality, a playfulness devoid of creativity, a place devoid of imagination or individuality. The cultural perspective, or so-called conventional wisdom, for example, is generally a one-sided view of lack and fear. It could be fear of disapproval or fear of rejection, fear of being considered selfish or strange or simply not right. As a result, we lose our perspective, our ability to grow, and all too often we give up, choosing a comfortable life over adventure.

We forget courage, encouragement, and settle for a false sense of security and community. Some people spend their entire lives in this psychological state of mind, petrifying themselves in this state of sleepwalking through life. If we experience the death of our mother while growing up, we will internalize this negative archetypal energy, and over time, it will become inscribed in our physical body. As we grow up, we feel unacceptable to our parents, despised, unwanted, or threatened, and as a result, our nervous system becomes hypervigilant, and we withdraw and become defensive.

The Intelligent Pagan - Fatherless Society and Devouring Mother

Those who are still completely devoted to their physicality and see physical connection as the highest happiness of earthly existence have not yet transcended the animal level of mere meaningfulness. They have not yet recognized themselves as soul and spirit. As a result, they know nothing of the bliss of spiritual oneness.

Steps - Death Mother Complex

Continuing this, I'd like to share with you five steps for working with the Death Mother Complex.

• The first step we must take in working with this Death Mother Complex is to recognize that we are denying its depth.

It is deeply ingrained in us to deny that our mother failed us. A leverage effect was drastically obvious, and often we try to excuse it by saying she did her best as she was. We may also try to create the illusion that our family is good and better than others, or that our family wasn't right, and we just move on. The true essence is that our denials and illusions must be sacrificed so that our creative potential and capacity for love can be released.

We recognize the Death Mother when we realize that the mother we want to love, whose love and approval we longed for, doesn't accept us, wants part of us or all of us dead or different in some way. When we fear confrontation, disapproval, when people don't like us, we recognize the Death Mother.

Because the Mother is present, we have been taught to stifle our anger, initiative, and creativity and to please our mother, act on it, or avoid her. Naturally, our survival efforts transform into defense mechanisms of pleasing, fear of obesity, vomiting, chronic fatigue, autoimmune diseases, or a host of other physical disorders. When we are attacked by greed through these defense mechanisms, we fear and try to destroy anything that promises true transformation.

Or we instill changes that seem creative and even heroic, but never get to the core of our problem, and we never find a satisfying life. Furthermore, the Death Mother creates in us a deadly fear of being exposed as inadequate because this makes any kind of real intimacy problematic.

The Shadow - Confronting the Death Mother

Unfortunately, they never face their deep wounds. Their shadow. If you change your life accordingly, we must accept our true reality. What is our true reality? We must discover it. This isn't about judging ourselves or our parents. It's about looking at ourselves and letting go of denial. And you, for the sake of truth, the truth of our own reality. And we must build strength before we confront our Death Mother. It's not an easy undertaking; it's a labor of love. In other words, we must build our strength before we tackle this issue.

We must develop our personhood and not confront the mother directly. We must learn how to honor and do our inner work to keep pace with our dreams. Active imagination as a sacred endeavor, not as another task we try to cram into a day already filled with tasks. Loving ourselves in this way, in a way that grows our consciousness and transforms us, and it strengthens and expands us. This is an important step in learning to be a good mother to ourselves and like the good father to ourselves. We must find the strength to build the walls around the space in which we can nurture ourselves, incubate new life, and safely bring our potential into the world.

Characteristics of the Death Mother

We can try to summarize the characteristics of the Death Mother by saying:

• She is distant,
• cold,
• doesn't know me,
• doesn't care about me,
• is often fixated on the victim role,
• has no heart for me,
• thinks everything revolves around her,
• is unappreciative,
• judgmental,
• bossy,
• full of negativity,
• cruel,
• abusive,
• kills hope,
• kills guilt,
• kills initiative,
• kills creativity,
• steals our energy,
• hurts body, mind, and spirit.

The Death Mother is both personal and cultural, as the wounds of the feminine in our society have robbed us of our deep respect for love, slowness, receptivity, and the value of inner and outer relationships.