Pilgrim for the Muse
Meeting the Goddess Face to Face with Novelist Elizabeth Cunningham
by Cait Johnson

When most people get back from abroad, they usually have photos to show of scenic vistas, exotic meals, local color. But when Elizabeth Cunningham, author of the acclaimed Maeve Chronicles, travels, she's searching for stories, making a pilgrimage for the muse. She soaks up the essence of place, immersing all her senses without benefit of camera. In the process, she sometimes has vivid personal encounters with deity.

In fact, her latest trip yielded startling experiences with two aspects of the goddess, Artemis of Ephesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, experiences which Cunningham brings vividly to life in her brilliant new novel, Bright Dark Madonna, coming out from local publisher Monkfish in early April.

That trip almost didn't happen. Traveling is time-consuming and expensive and Cunningham wasn't sure she could afford to go to Turkey, where her title character, Maeve, a feisty Celtic Mary Magdalen, spends some time in Bright Dark Madonna. But when she hit a snag in the midst of writing the novel, it was a travel memory that got her unstuck.

"I had made a pilgrimage to Magdalen country in France just before I began the writing. In the crypt of a church, I stood face to face with black Sara la Kali, patron Saint of the Gypsies. It was intensely moving for me. Later, I came unstuck when I wrote about a dream in which Maeve stands before the statue of Saint Sara, just as I did. The sensual power of that memory, surfacing spontaneously in the writing, persuaded me that some of the story lay waiting for me in Ephesus." So she took the hint, raised the funds, and took off for Turkey in June of 2007.

Cunningham's vivid sense-memories infuse her novels with a lively sensuality. "There are things about a place that can only be discovered if you go in person," she says. "If I had done only the usual on-line research, I never would have known that the soil in the hills above Ephesus is flecked with mica, for instance. Or that the house of the Virgin Mary is set in a fold formed by three hills. And there was a moment when I stood on the plain of Ephesus beside an ancient solitary pillar. On top of the pillar was a stork nest and, while I watched, the stork took off. The sound of the hot wind in the reeds, the beating of those large wings—it was haunting. I had a sense of all times being present—the distant past, the future."

This memory finds its way into the book when Maeve brings her mother-in-law, Ma (aka the Blessed Virgin Mary) to the busy temple to see the statue of Artemis. While Ma and the Goddess commune, Maeve has her own moment of timelessness: "It seemed as though they went back to a time when there was no temple, just a plain and spring, a huge oak tree with a swarm of bees in its hollow, and a smooth black standing stone that, like the spring and the tree, was also the goddess. Centuries passed, the temple rose and fell, rose and fell, till in the end there was nothing again but a plain and a spring, wind in the reeds, and no tree or stone, just one lone column topped by a stork's nest. I watched the bird rise on it gangly legs and fly away."

Because she absorbs the feeling of a place with all her senses, Cunningham helps us to inhabit those places ourselves, and her personal encounters with the goddess bring female power vividly to life for her readers. Maeve's description of Artemis, for instance, is shaped by Cunningham's own experience of the statue: "Her face was stern, and she was clothed in creation—pomegranates, eggs, bees, lions, bulls, and other horned beasts… I looked at the statue again, and all at once, I felt her power, as if something, maybe the goddess, herself, had hurled a bolt of lightning straight into my veins. This graven image wasn't just an inert bit of carved stone, it was an encoded secret...."

Artemis isn't the only powerful goddess in the book: there is Maeve herself, and the fascinating Ma. As Cunningham points out, "Many people view the Virgin Mary as a tamed version of the older goddesses, given a place by the Church because they couldn't eradicate her. In Bright Dark Madonna, Ma is anything but tame."

How did she come up with such an unconventional depiction of the Blessed Mother? "I often write in an exploratory way and let characters reveal themselves, rather than making decisions about them ahead of time. And Ma did just that. She is otherworldly and autocratic, difficult and bold—and far from being obedient, she celebrates the meaning of her name Miriam as bitter rebellion. She has a wonderful time anticipating her role as the new goddess of the Western world."

Cunningham included a visit to the Virgin Mary's house in the hills above Ephesus on her itinerary. "It's a huge tourist site," she says, "So I wasn't expecting much. But when I went inside and sat down, I was overwhelmed with a sense of her presence. I experienced both sorrow and profound release from sorrow. There is something immensely powerful about the union of person, place, and legend. In fact, it became an unexpected theme in the novel."

Readers, rejoice: in Cunningham's hands, person, place, and legend take on abundant and juicy new life.

Find out more about the Maeve Chronicles at www.passionofmarymagdalen.com. Elizabeth Cunningham will be reading (and perhaps singing) from Bright Dark Madonna at Oblong Bookstore in Rhinebeck on April 3, and at Merritt Books in Millbrook on April 4. If you want to see the goddess embodied, be there.