The primordial Dark Mother and her values of transformation have existed in the human psyche since ancient times. Her image is specifically apparent in the Black Madonna, Mary Magdalene, Hecate, Demeter, and numerous other female divinities of the earth.
The Dark Mother, as a figure of mythology, is created at the collective archetypal layer of the psyche. Her image appears in all cultures: African, Hindu, Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and countless other cultural and religious sources. In 15,000 bce, Africans sketched fifteen figures of the dark mother in red ochre on the walls of the Grotto dei Genovesi in the Egadi islands south of Palermo, Italy. The images existed fifteen millennia before the common era (Birnbaum, 1993: 26–28).
Black Mother: Ibla Nera
The characteristics of Ibla neraor black Ibla, a contraction of the name of the Anatolian (ultimately African) goddess Cybele brought to Sicily by traders from west Asia, were transferred, in the Christian epoch to the Black...
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Madden, K. (2010). Dark Mother. In: Leeming, D.A., Madden, K., Marlan, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_152
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