To many who have studied the more than 500 Black Madonna in Europe, the deity reminds us that devotion to The Mother did not disappear three to five thousand years ago with the appearances of the sky gods in the Middle East, but went underground.

The source of Destiny Kinal's inspiration in her novel Burning Silk is the Black Madonna at the mouth of France's Rhone River in The Camargue.

This Black Madonna stands in a crypt beneath a small church in Saintes Maries de la Mer. Nothing subterranean exists in this small church concerning the worship of the Black Madonna: the walls of the church are covered with primitive paintings from earlier centuries depicting life events in which people are rising from sick beds, escaping being trampled by horses, saved from drowning at sea. Each dated painting features a blue aura in the upper margin with the three women in a boat coming to rescue the devotee from harm.

The three women--Biblical women--are Sara in the middle, the patron saint of Gypsies, and the two Marias, Marie Jacobe and Marie Salome. Some say the woman in the middle was Marie Magdalene and that Sara was their servant. This author believes that Sara was the deity that legend has it was being brought from Alexandria Egypt to Europe.

A small wooden boat sits in a niche in the church. Each year, Gypsies and others gather here in May and--some mounted on the famous "amphibian" white horses of Camargue, others on foot--carry the replica of the boat in the church into the ocean, to wet it and renew their faith.

When Kinal first visited Sts. Maries de la Mer in the mid 70's, the oceanside was occupied by single story, oval stuccoed houses, with remarkable roof beams sticking out from beneath thatched roofs like bowsprits pointed out to sea. The semiwild white horses, whose colts are born black, feed from the edge of the sea on seeweed and other briny creatures. Les gardiens, France's cowboys, raise black bulls for the Spanish bullfights, which they herd with trident prods, the symbol of les gardiens, together with their appearance mounted on white horses with their broad brimmed black hats.

When Kinal began imagining a sisterhood in charge of raising silk--for the secrets of silk are passed mother to daughter--it occurred to her that they might have a secret devotion to an earth-based deity predating Christianity. This still seems like a reasonable hypotheses as devotion to the Black Madonna continues unabated today. The annual pilgrimage at Czestochowa Poland provides one measure of our older roots, closer than a sky god focused on justice, a female deity to whom we can pray in childbirth, when the butter won't churn out of the milk, when one's child is at risk. Wikipedia says of interpretation of the significance of the Black Madonnas that "The 'feminine power' approach is sometimes linked to female sexuality, which was allegedly repressed by the medieval church." Kali, the black Hindu goddess, is also often linked to destruction and to powers that can be cataclysmic and consuming. Catherine, the protagonist of Burning Silk, speaks of the terrible generative powers of La Madonne Noire.