Sitara said, with awful distinctness, ‘I think I’m going to die’. And that’s how I got stuck with the annual corpse. Half an hour later I stood in an empty flat, along with a stranger who was very recently, and very violently, dead. Rushing to Sitara’s aid, Lalli’s niece Sita is distracted by Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Why is it monochrome? And what does it have to do with the body on the living-room floor? Such questions are hardly relevant to the police in their hunt for the murderer. But Lalli is a detective who revels in curiosities, and she thinks otherwise. A brisk thriller of deceit and intrigue, The Monochrome Madonna has Lalli at her most astute as she interprets the nuances of a murder without motive.

Following the internationally acclaimed Gold of Kings, Storm Syrrell returns in the compelling story of The Black Madonna. Antiques expert Storm Syrrell heads to Europe to investigate the clandestine trade in religious artifacts. She dismisses superstitious tales of miraculous healings and divine omens. Yet when an obsessive Russian oligarch calls—just as her friend Harry Bennett vanishes—all assumptions must be cast aside. Storm seeks answers in a medieval monastery. There, the scarred visage of an icon provokes ever more startling questions. Is she prepared to confront both earthly and spiritual powers? Storm remains haunted by lessons in love and betrayal that lie just outside her grasp. But hesitation now holds mortal consequences.

For his exhibition "Black Madonna" African-American artist Theaster Gates examined representations of black women, cultural legacies and spirituality. With his band, the Black Monks, he also engaged in a multifaceted musical and performative programme. Through pictorial reportage and new essays, the book illuminates the working methods and concepts underlying the project. Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (09.06. - 21.10.2018).

An experiential guide to the ancient healing rituals of the Black Madonna • Reveals the practices and rites of the still-living cult of the Black Madonna in the remote villages of Southern Italy, including the healing rites of the tarantella dance • Details shamanic chants, rhythms, and songs and how to use them for self-healing, transformation, and recovery from abuse, trauma, depression, and addiction • Explores the many sacred sites of the Madonnas and connects them to other Great Goddesses, such as Isis, Aphrodite, Cybeles, and the Orisha Yemanja and Ochun • Includes access to 12 audio tracks The mysteries of the Black Madonna can be traced to pre-Christian times, to the ancient devotion to Isis, the Earth Goddess, and the African Mother, to the era when God was not only female but also black. Sacred sites of the Black Madonna are still revered in Italy, and, as Alessandra Belloni reveals, the shamanic healing traditions of the Black Madonna are still alive today and just as powerful as they were millennia ago. Sharing her more than 35 years of research and fieldwork at sacred sites around the world, Belloni takes you on a mystical pilgrimage of empowerment, initiation, and transformation with the Black Madonna. She explains how her love for Italian folk music led her to learn the ancient tammorriata musical tradition of the Earth Goddess Cybele and the Moon Goddess Diana and discover the still-living cult of the Black Madonna in the remote villages of Southern Italy. She vividly describes the sensual shamanic drumming and ecstatic trance dance rituals she experienced there, including the rites of the tammorriata, the transgender rite of Femminielli, and the erotic “spider dance” of the tarantella, which has been used for centuries in the Mediterranean for healing. Sharing chants, rhythms, and sacred songs, she details how she uses these therapeutic musical and trance practices to heal women and men from abuse, trauma, depression, and addiction and shows how these practices can be used for self-healing and transformation, including her personal story of using the tarantella to overcome cervical cancer. Revealing the profound transformative power of the Black Madonna, Belloni shows how She is the womb of the earth, the dark side of the moon, and the Universal Mother to all. Truly alive for all to call upon, She embraces and gives everyone access to Her divine strength and unconditional love.

Three mothers from New York's Little Italy struggle to maintain their traditions while their sons chafe under the oppressive weight of their ethnic community.

In this collection, black religious scholars and pastors whose expertise range from theology, ethics, and the psychology of religion, to preaching, religious aesthetics, and religious education, discuss the legacy of Albert B. Cleage Jr. and the idea of the Black Madonna and child. Easter Sunday, 2017 will mark the fifty year anniversary of Albert B. Cleage Jr.’s unveiling of a mural of the Black Madonna and child in his church in Detroit, Michigan. This unveiling symbolized a radical theological departure and disruption. The mural helped symbolically launch Black Christian Nationalism and influenced the Black Power movement in the United States. But fifty years later, what has been the lasting impact of this act of theological innovation? What is the legacy of Cleage’s emphasis on the literal blackness of Jesus? How has the idea of a Black Madonna and child informed notions of black womanhood, motherhood? LGBTQ communities? How has Cleage’s theology influenced Christian education, Africana pastoral theology, and the Black Arts Movement? The contributors to this work discuss answers to these and many more questions.

It is not easy to quickly or simply answer the question of what the Black Madonna actually represents. One answer leads to more questions which in turn demand more explanations. A possible reason for this turmoil lies in the difficulty our culture has always had in consciously integrating the feminine side of life, and especially its dark side. Another reason is the nature of the dark feminine itself, which defies attempts to give eternally fixed limits to what she represents. Still, she reflects herself in our personal and collective lives and gives intimations of her most essential meaning through images, myths, dreams, and fantasies. If we are willing to receive and be open to such phenomena, we stand a chance of not only knowing in part what she might represent but, more so, experiencing the healing force she embodies in our time. This darker aspect of the feminine has throughout history been both feared and sought after, both hated and admired. The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln stands among the many Black Virgins that seem to imagistically express this dark side of the feminine in a creative transformational manner for both the individual and the collective. Beginning with a history of the Einsiedeln Madonna, Dr. Gustafson broadens his analysis into a psychological and historical examination of the Black Madonna, from her roots in the pagan deity Lilith and the archetype of the Great Mother, to her resurgence as the Virgin in the Middle Ages, to her life today as the unheeded unconscious archetype of the feminine.

The bestselling book from two prizewinning, critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco-a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city. In Spirits of San Francisco, #1 bestselling Cool Gray City of Love author Gary Kamiya joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya's illuminating narratives accompany Madonna's masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure. Paul Madonna's atmospheric images will awe: his wide-angle drawings offer a new perspective on the “crookedest street in the world” and vistas across the city. And Kamiya's engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers striking vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of “Dumpville,” the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump. Handsome and irresistible-much like the city it chronicles-Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city.

Biography of Lakota woman, Madonna Swan. Her life on an Indian reservation and her struggle with tuberculosis.