Waking Up to the Dark
The Black Madonna's Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
2022 Foreword INDIES Award Winner | Silver: Body, Mind Spirit
2023 IPPY Award Winner | Bronze: New Age/Mind, Body, Spirit
Hidden in the darkness is an ancient secret suppressed by every aspect of our light-drunk modern world—there is a Great Mother from the bottom of time who has always guided us through perils and calamities. Now is the hour of Her return.
“An exigent, affecting summons to rediscover the night.”—Kirkus Reviews
Is darkness synonymous with ignorance and evil? Or is it the original matrix from which all life emerges, and the Mother to whom it returns? Higher and higher levels of artificial illumination have suppressed our contact with the numinous since the Industrial Revolution, with dire consequences for society, our planetary ecology, and our souls. This mystical testament weaves together paleobiology, memoir, history, science, and spiritual archaeology to lead readers back into the lost mysteries of the dark. Not since The Teachings of Don Juan or Ishmael has a book diagnosed with such urgency and cultural coherence the problems at the heart of modern life.
In Waking Up to the Dark, Clark Strand offers penetrating insight into the spiritual enrichment that can be found when we pull the plug on our billion-watt culture. He argues that the insomnia so many of us experience as “the Hour of the Wolf” is really “the Hour of God”—a wellspring of rest and renewal, and an ancient reservoir of ancestral wisdom and inspiration. And in a powerful yet surprising turn, he shares with us an urgent message for the world, received through a mysterious young woman he calls Our Lady of Climate Change (aka THE VIRGIN MARY), about the challenges we all know are coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tricycle columnist Strand (The Way of the Rose) delivers an incoherent paean to darkness. "We don't know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it," Strand contends, stringing together musings on Christianity, Buddhism, paganism, and science to argue for the merits of nighttime. He decries light pollution and details a study that found participants shielded from sources of light while sleeping would wake in a meditative state for a couple hours during the night before falling back asleep, suggesting humans were not meant to doze straight through the night. However, his assertions more frequently forgo supporting evidence, as when he posits that people who leave outdoor lamps on overnight have worse sex ("Sex belongs to the darkness, not the light"). Readers will struggle to follow his convoluted logic, particularly in the chapter about his spiritual encounters with an apparition-like figure he calls the "Black Madonna," in which he zooms from stories of Hindu goddesses to depictions of mother Mary to pondering the climate apocalypse, concluding that "life is close." Riddled with prose that borders on nonsense ("Apart from the grave, footsteps are the body's most honest answer to the question of gravity"), this is good for inducing sleep, but not much else.
