I very much admire the slow and stately Filipino dark fairy tale, In My Mother’s Skin. From one of its opening images of a Madonna in a wild jungle, to the final resolution, it sends a mysteriously simple message of faith that is well-earned. The witch that torments the heroine heightens the religious mystery of human choice, even when it seems to the heroine there is no choice.
Yet there is one early image from the film, that passes almost unnoticed:
Next to the altar of the Madonna is a statue of a crone, whose face is smelted away. Here she appears as the left hand of the Madonna.
To my mind this hint, perhaps unconscious on the part of the film-makers, alludes to a deeper mysticism that is beyond what the horror genre can express. In a higher sense, the witch is part of the sublime mystery of the Madonna. But we have to look beyond the horror film to find this higher integration of esoteric imagery.
In apocryphal Abrahamic traditions, like Kabbalah, alchemy, and gnosticism, the Dark Feminine is accorded a special place as an aspect of God. In the pagan mysteries of Demeter/Persephone and Isis/Nepthys, the dark goddess held the most sacred provenance over underworld, magic and resurrection.
And in the Chaldean oracles, the esoteric figure of Hecate — queen of witches, queen of hell, goddess of the crossroads — could be a nemesis or a guide: She could tip you into spiraling deeper into the labyrinth, or She could open the door out of the labyrinth, according to the justice of your smallest choices.
She who has the keys. She who holds the lamp. Black Virgin.
This imagery of the queen of the labyrinth, far from being unheard of in Christianity, finds its most striking resonance in the carvings of black madonna images underneath the Cathedral of Chartres, such as this evocative picture of the Mother Mary.
