China Galland

< back to Women of Vision

“To say that one is ‘longing for darkness’ is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration.”

China Galland is the award winning author of Love Cemetery and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, the new edition of which was published simultaneously by Penguin in 2007 with Love Cemetery to celebrate Galland's work. Her book, The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion was a finalist for the "Best Spiritual Book" award for a Better Life.

Galland is one of the world's foremost authorities on the Black or Dark Madonnas.
China has traveled all throughout Europe to the shrines of the Black Madonna. The Black Madonnas are dark-skinned icons of the Virgin Mary, and for China, they serve as a corrective to the omnipresent images of God as white-skinned and male.
In her book, Longing for Darkness, China relates that, “Mary is also God: unacknowledged, female and dark. She is the Mother of God.” China found on her pilgrimage that there is a positive and essential aspect to the dark. There is a dark, divine feminine that has been left unrecognized.

During her pilgrimage, and in her work, China was able to go into the depths of her being and find what the darkness had to give her- a transformative connection to the divine. And by bringing wholeness to her life, China has given all of us a more complete vision of God, a vision of Mary’s dark face as the feminine face of God.