Soon is the name of the forest and the area around Spabrücken, where Our Lady’s church was erected as part of a monastery in 1359…

Going back to prehistoric times, black was the symbol for the earth and the Great Mother, the source of heaven and earth. The darker earth is, the more fertile, hence black was the color of fertility and creative power…

Tradition says that around the year 1775 a local tenant farmer by name of Peter Becker sought relief from a debilitating illness at the feet of the Black Madonna in the Carthusian monastery near Koblenz…

The first church built on this site was the Church of Our Lady (Nagyboldogasszony templom), founded in 1038 by St. Stephen, the first king of Hungary…

According to tradition, the Black Madonna of St. Luke in Bologna was painted by St. Luke the evangelist and brought to Italy from Constantinople in the 5th century, then painted over in the 12th century. Her sanctuary was founded by a woman.

There are two Black Madonnas in the sanctuary of St. Anthony of Padua. One was whitened in spite of more than 800 years of tradition venerating a Black Madonna with a strong connection to St. Anthony and proof existing that both Madonnas were conceived as Black from the start. Our Mother’s black skin was stolen, because too many people found her more beautiful with white skin: a racist mutilation!

Our Lady of Consolation in Turin, Italy, reputedly painted by St. Luke the Evangelist, likely a formerly Black Madonna like so many others attributed to him and associated with the Augustinian order. She had to be hidden from her enemies in the earth twice but always made sure she was found again. Very miraculous.

This Black Madonna appeared in a tree near Stansstad on Vierwaldstaetter lake and saved fishermen in a storm.

Later, French revolutionaries threw her into the lake. She was found intact and all the more highly venerated until a bishop, apparently influenced by the French spirit of “reason”, decried her as “Pagan handiwork” and banned her. After the bishop passed, the people wanted to bring their precious Mother back into her church, but she had become the private property of a family that only allowed an exact copy to be made for the town that had let her go.

Black Madonna of Sonogno (most beautiful village of Switzerland) a miracle working copy of Our Lady of Loreto. The previous statue was burnt as a remnant of Pagan Goddess worship by a priest in the 1920’s. Apparently a common sentiment among Swiss clergy around that time. The furious villagers got rid of the priest and replace their Dark Mother. Fresco is what remains of her older incarnation.

This “Lourdes of Switzerland” was a gift of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln. In 1581, she appeared to a handicapped, destitute peasant in a dream and told him where to dig for a sacred well to be healed. The price: his six daughters all went home to their heavenly mother in one week. That put the fear of the Black Madonna into the villagers and they installed White Madonnas instead. Only in the 1950’s with a modern church being built, did they commission a copy of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln.

This seemingly insignificant Black Madonna, like her other Swiss sisters in Einsiedeln, Sonogno, and Stansstad, withstood the plans of those who would whitewash or ban Black Madonnas.

She was formerly White but found to be a Black Madonna during renovations. Restored to her original blackness and honored with solemn processions.