Black Madonna

From TheBestLinks.com

A Black Madonna (also, Black Virgin) is a statue or painting of Mary in which she is depicted as having black skin. Hundreds of them exist in southern France alone.

The factual cause of the Black Madonnas is simply that they are statues carved out of black wood or stone (such as Our Lady of Rocamadour, or have been blackened by centuries of candle smoke and incense burned before the images by worshippers. Hence these traditional Black Madonnas are ones that have a long history of devotion, and did not originally depict the Virgin as a woman of the African race. (Although such depictions are not uncommon in Modern Art.)

According to some legends, however, the Black Madonnas do not depict Mary, the mother of Jesus, but rather Mary Magdalene. It is certainly true that where there are Black Madonnas, there generally is also a strong tradition of venerating Mary Magdalene. According to this fringe view, the Black Madonna is claimed to symbolize the hidden story of Mary Magdalene, after she fled to Egypt pregnant with Jesus's child and then went on safely to Provence, France. An argument against this view is that, as stated above, most Black Madonnas were not originally intended to be black, hence there can be no causal link between their black appearance and their subject matter.

A possible explanation is that she was venerated by many "heretics" who claimed private knowledge of the "true story" of "what happened". They would have had to keep such knowledge hidden because presumably men in power through apostolic succession would be jealous of a Mary Magdalene who would be considered the "disciple Jesus loved best".