The Black Madonna: Enlightenment in Darkness

When Lorna Roberts writes in Journey To The Black Madonna (1998), "The Black Madonna takes us back to cultures preceding Christianity", she only tells us half of the story. I tend to think that 'the Lady of the Battles', as some authors like to call her, takes us to the future; she helps us to envision future identities and cultures, shaped according to our own wishes, demands and spiritual needs, instead of being colonized by the horrors of the Hobbesian Myth and the prefab identities of civilisation. For many centuries, people have envisioned other worlds, better worlds, authentic worlds, and they have tried to make us sensitive to their noble aspirations: become what you are.

Within this existential quest, the notion and vision of the Black Madonna have proven to be a strong and supportive force. As Colleen O'Connor strikingly states in Seeking Light in Darkness (1997): "Underneath all our conditioning, hidden in the crypt of our being, near the waters of life, the Black Virgin is enthroned with her child: the dark latency of our own essential nature, that which we were always meant to be".

In popular culture, this consciousness of a future or virtual identity - "the dark latency of our essential nature" - is embraced by the black (electronic) underground. Sonic philosophers like Sun Ra and Lee 'Scratch' Perry have proclaimed that their music and cosmologies come from the future, from outer space. Hip hop-genius Kool Keith, a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, says he is born on Jupiter and has been faxed to Planet Earth, in order to create a better place down here. In this sense, the spirit of the Black Madonna is not of this world.

The Black Madonna appears in many disguises and listens to many names. I favour 'Lady Underground', a pseudonym provided by Carminha Levy in her essay The Power of the Black Madonna (1998). By referring to the notion of underground, Levy takes a leap into the black holes of established culture. In honouring the Black Madonna, Levy continues, we become more vulnerable to "clear-sightedness" - we start to see more clearly, in order to find out who we really are and what we really want. One feature of the underground is without doubt its lack of historical subjectivity: you are part of the underground if you are not part of history. Underground is the shadow casted by established culture; a matrix of temporary autonomous zones where subjectivity and identity are under constant reconstruction. It is therefore hardly surprising that Black Madonna adherents attribute personal essences, notions and convictions to our Lady Underground. The Black Madonna is an information and communication medium, through which we are able to rethink and to remix our identity and sense of history.

Popular and underground cultures are deeply pervaded by her spirit and gifts, like the scratch and the sample, to mention only two of them. In contemporary music culture, the scratch and the sample have transformed our approach to music in particular and to culture in general dramatically. In the scratch, a DJ cuts down a record to rhythm and bass lines, thus eliminating harmony and melody as provided by the original artists. On a deeper cultural level, as audio-cyborg and philosopher Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) pointed out, scratching rehabilitates the practices of noise and rhythm. Within the realm of the Hobbesian Enlightenment Project, noise and rhythm were considered barbarian degenerations of culture. Civilisation on the other hand was identified with harmony: equilibrium-entrepreneurs like Hobbes and Descartes were totally preoccupied with the concept of harmony - in music, culture and politics. Any movement towards noise and rhythm was considered a threat to civilisation. According to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the rise of harmony since the 17th century symbolized the decay of cultural diversity in Europe.

Sampling is a practice in which the musician digitalizes sounds, usually stolen from previously recorded analogue records, in order to assemble them within a new sonic context. In other words, the sampler enables us to rewrite the history of music and to articulate our personal annotations to musical traditions, styles and genres. It is not surprisingly that the scratch and the sample were fully employed by the black underground. When discussing these cultural innovations, the names of Sun Ra, Lee Perry, George Clinton, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash come to mind. These imagineers were not musicians in the strict sense of the word, however, in a remarkable variety of sonic experiments, they provided a cultural remix of history and identity, especially suited for members of the African or Asian diaspora (also known as Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism). We can find fine examples in the integration of ancient Egyptian knowledge in the space-jazz of Sun Ra; the fusion of African Burra-drumming and Rasta-philosophy in Lee Perry's Black Ark-dub-recordings; the mixing of Arabian hymns in Scotty Hard's hyperdub soundescapes. Jim Jarmush's most recent feature film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samourai (1999), provides another clear illustration of the impact of Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism in contemporary culture: we are confronted with the quest of an Afro-American hit man, trying to cope with ancient African and Chinese wisdom in a world dominated by diaspora and lack of historical subjectivity.

Black Madonna's, Afrofuturism, space-jazz, dub and the black electronic underground...what do they have in common? They offer singular expressions and practices within a universal context of diasporical cultures; they provide us with possibilities to remix history and identity, in order to unveil our essential nature and to redefine our place in time and space. If this is true, the spirit of the Black Madonna has finally cast its shadow onto the Old World, seeking enlightenment in darkness.