The Black Madonnas of Southern Italy

The shrine of the Madonna of Montevergine overlooks the Amalfi Coast, but at nearly 4,900 feet above sea level, feels like a different world. You can drive there, but the faithful go by foot up the ancient shepherd’s paths, praying along the way, which can take days. The icon is considered one of Southern Italy’s “Black Madonnas,” worshipped at the same sites as pre-Christian earth goddesses. Black refers to the literal earth, not her skin pigmentation. Below the church of Montevergine lie fragments of a temple of Cybele, a mother earth goddess imported to the Roman world via Anatolia.

A shadow ruin is how I describe a ritual that persists even though the stones of a temple or church are lost or still buried. The Black Madonna of Montevergine is a perfect illustration. The shrine is a major Catholic holy site, but the Black Madonna is especially sacred to transgender people who annually pilgrimage to Montevergine every February 2nd. The rituals associated with the day are dancing, drumming, and playing tambourines in the piazza in front of the church, all day and into the night.

Cybele in the Roman world is most often shown with a tambourine. Photo credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

Moreover, the priests of Cybele’s temple would castrate themselves to remove sex as a barrier toward spiritual unity with the goddess. They wore bright-colored clothes and played tambourines and castanets. A mosaic from the 1st century in nearby Pompeii, now on view at the Naples Archaeological Museum, gives us a beautiful picture of this world.

Another Black Madonna site near Potenza sits on a mountaintop 300 feet higher than the city of Denver. Below her shrine lies the third largest oil reserve in Europe.

In Positano, the Black Madonna is brought out to sea by fishermen who then return her to the shore by candlelight, a shadow ruin of the worship of Aphrodite. People fleeing Paestum in the early Middle Ages settled Positano, and at Paestum archaeologists have discovered a giant swimming that was used to practice the rites of Aphrodite’s arrival by sea.

The swimming pool at Paestum with graded entry and a shelves for displaying candles and devotional images of Aphrodite.

In 1905, emigrants from Tindari in Sicily transported their Black Madonna, whose shrine was built atop a temple of Cybele, to East 13th Street in New York City. In the late 1990s, scholar Dr. Joseph Sciorra studied this community and then discovered the shrine as part of what had become the Phoenix Bar and reinvigorated the festa in a more secular mode of dancing and poetry readings. After a two-year hiatus because of Covid-19, the celebration will resume on September 8, 2022.

The study of Black Madonnas has limited reach in academia as it requires a challenging reach across disciplines including folklore, music, and religious studies. Spiritual practices devoted to the Black Madonnas persist, often in the realm of New Age spirituality which doesn’t pair well with academia. This topic remains as frustrating as it is fascinating. But the more I study about the ancient world in Southern Italy, the more I’m convinced we’re always humming some version of the same song.

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